PILOTS OF THE REPUBLIC 

THE ROMANCE OF THE PIONEER 
PROMOTER IN THE MIDDLE WEST 



UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME 

THE GLORY SEEKERS: The Romance of 
Would-be Founders of Empire in the Early 
Days of the Great Southwest By Wiluam 
Horace Brown. With sixteen portraits, and 
illustrative initials to chapters. 
12mo. %\.50net 

A. C. McCLURG & CO., Chicago 



PILOTS OF THE REPUBLIC 

THE ROMANCE OF THE PIONEER PROMOTER 
IN THE MIDDLE WEST 



BY 

ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT 

n 
Author of ^^ Historic Highways of America " "Washington 
and the West,^'' etc. 



WITH SIXTEEN PORTRAITS, AND ILLUSTRATIVE INITIAI^ 
BY WALTER J. ENRIGHT 




CHICAGO 
A. C. McCLURG & CO. 

1906 



Copyright 
A. C. McClurg & Co. 
1906 

Published October 29, 1906 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

NOV 12 1906 

,„^ Copyriehf tPtry 
/i^^' / ^- > 9 4, 
CLASS CK. XXc, No. 

/ t 3 4 O 

COPY B. 



THE UNIVEHSITV" PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. 3. A, 



To 
CHARLES G. DAWES, Esq. 

THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED 

IN TOKEN OF THE AUTHOR"'s APPRECIATION OP 

A MODERN PROMOTER 

WHOSE IDEALS AND CHIVALRY TAKE RANK 

WITH THOSE OF THE OLDEN TIME 



PREFACE 

THE student of European history is not surprised 
to find ,tliat individuals stand out prominently 
in every activity that occupied man's attention ; 
that even though there be under consideration great popu- 
lar movements, such as the Crusades or the Reformation 
or French Revolution, attention centres around significant 
personalities. In the day of monarchies and despotisms, 
individual initiative very naturally led the way in out- 
lining policies, selecting lieutenants, finding ways and 
means. 

It is singular to what a great extent this is true in the 
history of democratic America, preeminently the land 
where the people have ruled and where the usurper of 
power has had, comparatively, no opportunity whatever. 
And yet it is not too much to say that the history of our 
nation may be suggested in a skeleton way by a mere list 
of names, as, for instance, the history of the fourteenth 
century in Europe might easily be sketched. While we 
are proud to proclaim that America has given all men an 
equal opportunity, that the most humble may rise to tlie 
proudest position known among us, it yet remains singular 



X Preface 

that in this land where the popular voice has ruled as 
nowhere else almost every national movement or phase of 
development may be signified by the name of one man. 

This comes with appealing force to one who has at- 
tempted to make a catalogue of the men who have in a 
personal sense led the Star of Empire across this continent ; 
men who have, in a way, pooled issues with their country 
in the mutual hope of personal advantage and national 
advance. It then becomes plain to the investigator, if he 
never realized it before, that, at times, the nation has 
waited, even halted in its progress, for a single man, or 
a set of men, to plan what may have seemed an entirely 
selfish adventure and which yet has proved to be a great 
national advantage. In certain instances there was a clear 
and fair understanding between such promoters and the 
reigning administration, looking toward mutual benefit. 
At times the movement was in direct defiance of law and 
order, with a resulting effect of immeasurable moment for 
good. Again, there may have been no thought of national 
welfare or extension ; personal gain and success may have 
been the only end ; and the resultant may have been a 
powerftil national stimulus. 

Perhaps the most remarkable feature that appears on 
an examination of American history along these lines 
(compared, for instance, with that of European powers) 
is that comparatively few leaders of military campaigns 
are to be classed among promoters who advanced national 



Preface xi 

ends in conjunction with personal ambitions. In the Old 
World numberless provinces came into the possession of 
military favorites after successful campaigns. In the many 
expeditions to the westward of the Alleghanies in America 
what commanders turned their attention later to the 
regions subdued ? Forbes, the conqueror of Fort Du- 
quesne, never saw the Ohio Valley again ; Bouquet, the 
other hero, with Gladwin, of Pontiac's Rebellion, never 
returned to the Muskingum, nor did Gladwin come back to 
Detroit ; Lewis, the victor at Point Pleasant, led no colony 
to the Ohio again ; " Mad Anthony " Wayne never had 
other than military interest in the beautiful Maumee Valley, 
where, in the cyclone's path, he crushed the dream of a 
powerful Indian confederacy lying on the flanks of the new 
Republic. To a singular degree the leaders of the military 
vanguard across the continent had really little to do per- 
sonally with the actual social movement that made the 
wilderness blossom as the rose. True, bounty lands were 
given to commanders and men in many instances, as in the 
case of Washington and George Rogers Clark ; but it was 
the occupation of such tracts by the rank and file of the 
armies that actually made for advancement and national 
growth, and in perhaps only one case was the movement 
appreciably accelerated by the course of action pursued in 
a civil way by those who had been the leaders of a former 
military expansion. How are we to explain the interesting 
fact that none of the generals who led into the West the 



xii Preface 

armies that won it for America are to be found at the 
head, for instance, of the land companies that later at- 
tempted to open the West to the flood-tide of immigration ? 
Did they know too well the herculean toils that such work 
demanded ? Why should General Rufus Putnam, General 
Moses Cleaveland, General Benjamin Tupper, General 
Samuel Holden Parsons, Colonel Abraham Whipple, — 
famous leader of the night attack on the Gaspee in the 
pre-Revolutionary days, — Judge John Cleve Symmes, 
Colonel Richard Henderson, lead companies of men to 
settle in the region which Andrew Lewis, Arthur St. Clair, 
Joseph Harmar, Anthony Wayne, and William Henry 
HaiTison had learned so well ? Of course more than one 
reason, or one train of reasons, exist for these facts; but 
it is not to be denied that those best acquainted with the 
existing facts, those having the clearest knowledge of 
the trials, dangers, and risks, both as regards health and 
finances, were not in any degree prominent in the later 
social movements. Many, of course, were soldiers by pro- 
fession, and itched not in the least for opportunity to 
increase their possessions by investment and speculation 
in a hazardous undertaking. But, had there been certain 
assurance of success, these men, or some of them, would, 
without doubt, have found ways and means of taking a 
part. Had one attempt proven successful, an impetus 
would have been given to other like speculations ; yet one 
will look in vain for a really profitable outcome to any 



Preface xiii 

undertaking described in these studies. The judgment of 
those best posted, therefore, was fully justified. 

But at the same time the American nation was greatly 
in the debt of the men who made these poor investments ; 
and, in one way or another, it came about that no great 
hardship resulted. This was no secret when these propo- 
sitions were under consideration, and the men interested 
were influenced not a little by the fact that their adventure 
would result in benefit to the cause of national advance. 
There was a kind of patriotism then shown that is to be re- 
membered by all who care to think of the steps taken by 
a weak, hopeful Republic ; in some ways the same body 
politic is still weak, and vastly in need of a patriotism not 
less warm than that shown in those early days of wonder- 
ment and anxiety. 

The reader of the succeeding pages may conceive that 
the author has not taken up each study in the same 
method, and judged the performances of each so-called 
" Pilot " by the same rule and standard. In the present 
instance the writer has considered that such treatment 
would be highly incongruous, there being almost nothing 
in common between the various exploits here reviewed, 
save only those that were incidental and adventitious. 
Each chapter may seem an independent study, related to 
that one following only through the general title that 
covers them all ; this, in the author's opinion, is better far 
than to attempt to emphasize a likeness, or over-color 



xiv Preface 

apparent resemblances, until each event may seem a natural 
sequence from a former. A babe's steps are seldom alike ; 
one is long and inaccurate, another short and sure, with 
many a misstep and tumble, and the whole a characterless 
procedure bespeaking only weakness and lack both of 
confidence and knowledge. Such, in a measure, was the 
progress of young America in the early days of her national 
existence. 

A. B. H. 

Marietta College, 
Marietta, Ohio, May 31, 1906, 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I Page 

Introductory : The Brother of the Sword . . 19 

CHAPTER II 
Washington : The Promoter of Western Invest- 
ments 37 

CHAPTER III 
Richard Henderson : The Founder of Transyl- 
vania 81 

CHAPTER IV 
Rufus Putnam : The Father of Ohio . . . . 103 

CHAPTER V 
David Zeisberger : Hero of " The Meadow of 

Light'' 129 

CHAPTER VI 
George Rogers Clark : Founder of Louisville . 149 

CHAPTER VII 
Henry Clay : Promoter of the First American 

Highway 179 



xvi CONTENTS 

' CHAPTER VIII Page 

Morris and Clinton : Fathers of the Erie Canal 207 

CHAPTER IX 
Thomas and Mercer : Rival Promoters of Canal 

AND Railway 233 

CHAPTER X 
Lewis and Clark : Explorers of Louisiana . . 257 

CHAPTER XI 
Astor: The Promoter of Astoria .... 279 

CHAPTER XII 
Marcus Whitman : The Hero of Oregon . . . 299 

CHAPTER XIII 
The Captains of " The American System " . . 339 

Index . 361 



LIST OF PORTRAITS 

Zeisberger Preaching to the Indians at Coshocton, Page 

Ohio, in 1773 Frontispiece 

Daniel Boone 30 

George Washington 68 

RuFus Putnam, Leader of the Founders of Marietta, 

Ohio 106 

Rev. Manasseh Cutler, Ohio Pioneer 114 

John Heckewelder, Missionary to the Indians . . . 142 

Rev. David Jones, Companion of George Rogers Clark l66 

Henry Clay, Statesman and Abolitionist 184' 

Albert Gallatin, Promoter of the Cumberland Road . 1 90 
General Arthur St. Clair, Appointed Governor of 

Ohio by Congress 204 

GouvERNEUR MoRRis, Promoter of the Erie Canal . . 212 

De Witt Clinton, Friend of the Erie Canal Project . 230 ' 

Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition 262 

William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition . 274 

John Jacob Astor, Founder of Astoria 288 

President James K. Polk 344' 



CHAPTER I 

Tlie Part played in American History by the Pioneer'' s 
Axe. — Several Classes of Leaders in the Conqitest of 
the Wilderness. — Patriotism even in those that were 
Self-seeking. — The Achievements of Ckaveland, Hender- 
son^ Putnam^ Morris, ami Astor, respectively. — Feeble- 
ness of the Republic in its Infancy. — Its need of Money. 
— The Pioneers were of all Races. — Other Leaders 
besides these Captains of Expansion accused of Self- 
seelcing. — Washingtoyi as the Father of the West. — 
His great Acquisitions of Land. — His Influence on 
other Land-seekers. — Results of Richard Henderson''s 
Advance into Kentucky. — Zeisberger''s Attempt to form 
a Settlement of Christian Indians thwarted by the Revo- 
lution. — Rifiis Putnam as a Soldier and a Pioneer. — 
As Leader of the Ohio Company of Associates., he makes 
a Settlement Northxoest of the Ohio, — Three Avenues 
of Westzvard Migration: Henry Clay''s Cumberland 
Road ; the Erie Canal ; the Baltimore and Ohio Rail- 
way. — TJiese A vermes not laid between Cities, but into 
the Western Wildeiiness. 



PILOTS OF THE REPUBLIC 



CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY : THE BROTHER OF THE SWORD 

HERE is some 
ground for the 
objection that is 
raised against 
allowing the his- 
tory of America 
to remain a mere 
record of battles 
and campaigns. 

I The sword had 

■'I . 

i its part to play, 

i| a glorious part 

^^^\ and picturesque, 

but the pioneer's axe chanted a truer tune than 

ever musket crooned or sabre sang. And with 

reference to the history of our Central AVest, for 

instance, it were a gross impartiality to remember 




22 Pilots of the Republic 

the multicolored fascinating story of its prelimi- 
nary conquest to the exclusion of the marvellous 
sequel — a great free people leaping into a wilder- 
ness and compelling it, in one short century, to 
blossom as the rose. 

To any one who seriously considers the magic 
awakening of that portion of the American Nation 
dwelling between the Alleghanies and the Mis- 
sissippi, there must sooner or later come the 
overpowering realization that the humble woods- 
man's broadaxe — that famous " Brother of the 
Sword " — has a story that is, after all, as fasci- 
nating and romantic as any story ever told. 

Lo, 't is myself I sing. 
Feller of oak and ash! 
Brother am I to the Sword, 
Red-edged slayer of men ! 
Side by side we have hewn 
Paths for the pioneer 
From sea to sun-smitten sea. 

It must be remembered that the sword made 
many conquests in this West, while the broadaxe 
made but one. France, and then England, pos- 
sessed the West, but could not hold it, for the 



Pilots of the Bepuhlic 23 

vital reason that this brother of the sword did 
not march in unison with those armies. In fact, 
both France and England attempted to keep the 
axe-bearing, home-building people back in order 
that the furs and the treasure yielded by the 
forests might not be withheld. But when the 
sword of a free people came across the AUeghanies 
the axe of the pioneer came with it, and a miracle 
was wrought in a century's time beside which the 
Seven Wonders of the Old World must forever 
seem commonplace. 

Of the men who led this army of real con- 
querors of the West to the scenes of their labors 
there were many. Some were leaders because of 
the inspiration they gave to others, some were 
leaders because they in person showed the way, 
enduring the toil, the privation, the pestilence, 
and the fate of pioneers. In whatever class these 
men may be placed, they were in reality patriots 
and heroes, even though at the time they were 
accused of seeking private gain and private for- 
tune. But through the perspective of the years 
it seems clear that whatever may have been their 



24 Pilots of the Republic 

private ends, — good, bad, or indifferent, — they 
were extremely important factors in the progress 
of their age. Whether seeking lands as a private 
speculation, or founding land companies or trans- 
portation companies in conjunction with others, 
they turned a waiting people's genius in a new 
direction and gave force and point to a social 
movement that was of more than epoch-making 
importance. Whether it was a Cleaveland found- 
ing a Western Reserve on the Great Lakes, a 
Henderson establishing a Transylvania in Ken- 
tucky, a Putnam building a new New England 
on the Ohio River, a Morris advocating an Erie 
Canal, or an Astor founding an Astoria on the 
Pacific Sea, the personal ambition and hope of 
gain, so prominent at the time, does not now 
stand preeminent ; in this day we see what the 
efforts of these men meant to a country whose 
destiny they almost seemed unwittingly to hold 
in their hands. 

It will ever be difficult to realize what a 
critical moment it was when, for a brief space 
of time, only Providence could tell whether the 



Pilots of the Republic 25 

young American Republic was equal to the 
tremendous task of proving that it could live 
by growing. The wisest men who watched its 
cradle wondered if that babe, seemingly of pre= 
mature birth, would live. But that was not 
the vital question ; the vital question was, Could 
it gi'ow ? The infant Republic possessed a mere 
strip of land on the seaboard ; the unanswerable 
argument of its enemies was that a weakling 
of such insignificant proportions, surrounded by 
the territories of England and Spain, could not 
live unless it could do more than merely exist ; 
after winning (by default) a war for liberty, it 
must now fight and win or lose a war of exter- 
mination. And where were the millions of 
money, the men, and the arms to come from 
that should prevent final annihilation ? The 
long war had prostrated the people ; the land 
had been overrun with armies, farms despoiled, 
trade ruined, cities turned into barracks, money 
values utterly dissipated. 

Just here it was that the mighty miracle was 
wrought; a strange army began to rendezvous, 



26 Pilots of the Republic 

and it was armed with that weapon which was 
to make a conquest the sword could never 
have made. It was the army of pioneers with 
axes on their shoulders. So spontaneously did 
it form and move away, so commonplace was 
every humble detail of its organization and prog- 
ress, so quietly was its conquest made, so few 
were its prophets and historians, that it has 
taken a century for us to realize its wonder 
and its marvel. 

America here and now gave the one proof of 
life — growi:h. Not from one point in particu- 
lar, but from every point, the ranks of this 
humble army were filled ; not one sect or 
race gave those rough and shaggy regiments 
their men, but every sect and every racial 
stock. 

That army had its leaders, though they wore 
only the uncouth regimentals of the rank and 
file. It is of certain of these Pilots of the Re- 
public that these pages treat, — men who were 
moved by what were very generally called selfish 
motives in their days. Yet against what human 



Pilots of the Republic 27 

motive may not the accusation of self-interest 
be cast? It has been hurled against almost 
every earnest man since Christ vras crucified in 
ignominy nineteen centuries ago. Scan the list 
of men herein treated, and you will not find a 
single promoter of the Central West who was 
not accused of harboring an ulterior motive, if 
not of downright perfidy. Some of the best of 
these leaders of the expansion movement were 
most bitterly maligned ; the heroic missionaries 
who forgot every consideration of health, com- 
fort, worldly prosperity, home, and friends were 
sometimes decried as plotting ambassadors of 
scheming knaves. 

The pure and upright Washington, looking 
westward with clearer eye and surer faith than 
any of his generation, was besmirched by the 
accusations of hypocritical self-aggrandizement. 
Yet he must stand first and foremost in the 
category of men who influenced and gave effi- 
ciency to that vital westward movement. This 
man, as will be shown, was more truly the 
" Father of the West " than he ever was " Father 



28 Pilots of the Republic 

of his Country." A decade before the Revolu- 
tion was precipitated in sturdy Massachusetts, 
he had become fascinated with the commercial 
possibilities of the trans- Alleghany empire. He 
explored the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers, 
and conceived what the future would bring forth ; 
he took up large tracts of lands. Before he died 
he owned many patents to land in what is now 
New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, 
Kentucky, Maryland, and Florida, as well as his 
home farms along the Potomac. He had a 
keen business sense, and demanded his full rights ; 
he forcibly ousted from his lands men who know- 
ingly usurped them ; and all through the years 
he was accused of using his preponderating in- 
fluence to further selfish plans ; he was called a 
land-shark and a robber. It is interesting to 
know that his own private conclusion was that 
his investments had not paid ; his words were 
that they had resulted more " in vexation than 
profit." And when he spoke those words he was 
master of between twenty and thirty thousand 
of the most fertile acres in the Ohio River basin. 



Pilots of the Bepuhlic 29 

Yet Washington had marvellously influenced 
the nation's destiny by these " unprofitable " in- 
vestments. The very position he occupied and 
which he was accused of misusing had power- 
fully stimulated the army that was carrying the 
broadaxe westward. In countless ways this man 
had given circulation to ideas that were inspiring 
and hopeful, and just so far as he believed he had 
failed as a private speculator, he had in reality 
triumphed mightily as the leading exponent of a 
growing Republic which was called upon to 
prove that it could grow. 

Richard Henderson stands out prominently 
as an honest leader of this army of conquerors. 
We can never read without a thrill the sentence in 
that letter of Daniel Boone's to Henderson in 
which the bold woodsman pleads the necessity 
of Henderson's hastening into Kentucky in 1775. 
All that Kentucky was and all that it did during 
the Revolution seems to have hung suspended 
on the advance of Richard Henderson's party 
through Cumberland Gap in that eventful April ; 
and those words of the guide and trail-blazer. 



30 Pilots of the Republic 

Boone, imploring that there be no delay, and 
emphasizing the stimulating effect that Hen- 
derson's advance would have on the various 
parties of explorers, have a ring of destiny in 
them. True, Virginia and North Carolina both 
repudiated Henderson's Indian purchase, and the 
promoter of historic Transylvania was decried 
and defamed ; but his advance into the valley 
of the Kentucky gave an inspiration to the scat- 
tered parties of vagrant prospectors that resulted 
in making a permanent settlement in that key- 
stone State of the West, which was of untold 
advantage to the nation at large. And later 
Virginia and North Carolina made good the loss 
the founder of Transylvania had suffered because 
of their earher repudiation. 

In V^ashington and Henderson we have two 
important factors in the advance of the pioneer 
army into the old Southwest — the region be- 
tween the Alleghanies and the Mississippi south 
of the Ohio River. 

Turning to the rich empire lying north of that 
river, a chapter belongs to that resolute herald 




Daniel Boone 



Pilots of tlie Republic 31 

of religious and social betterment, David Zeis- 
berger, who led his faithful Moravians from 
Pennsylvania to found an ideal settlement in 
central Ohio. The marvellous story of the in- 
domitable Catholic missionaries in America has 
been receiving something of its share of atten- 
tion by the reading world, a story so noble and 
inspiring that it is one of the precious heritages 
of the past ; that of the equally noble Protestant 
missionaries in the Middle and Far West has 
not yet received its due. The Moravian Breth- 
ren received the fii'st acre of land ever legally 
owned by white men in Ohio. Here, in " the 
Meadow of Light" on the Tuscarawas River, 
Zeisberger and his noble comrade, John Hecke- 
welder, attempted to found a civilized colony 
of Christian Indians. But for the Revolution, 
he would doubtless have succeeded. The story 
of his temporary success is of great romantic 
interest and of moment especially by way of 
comparison. A legal right to land was secured 
by this migrating colony of Indians under the 
leadership of white missionaries ; it was to be, to 



32 Pilots of the Bepuhlic 

all intents and purposes, a white man's settle- 
ment, and agi'iculture was to be the colony's 
means of support. Laws and rules of conduct 
were formulated, and for five interesting years 
a great degree of success attended the effort. 
Then came war, despoliation, and a thrilling 
period of wandering. But never was the fact 
of legal ownership ignored ; when the United 
States first enacted laws for the disposal of land in 
the Northwest Tenitory it excepted the district 
" formerly " allotted to the IMoravian Brethren. 

Again, the history of the Middle West con- 
tains no sturdier or sweeter character than Rufus 
Putnam, the head of the Ohio Company of 
Associates who made the first settlement in the 
Northwest Territory at Marietta. As evidence 
of what he was in time of danger, his long 
record in the old French War, the Revolution, 
and the Indian War in the West is open to all 
men ; what he was in days of peace — how he 
was the mainstay of his fellow officers in their 
attempt to obtain their dues from Congress, 
how he cheered westward that little company 



Pilots of the Republic 33 

which he led in person, how for two decades he 
was the unselfish friend of hundreds of this 
struggling army of pioneers — is a story great 
and noble. As we shall see, General Washing- 
ton, in a secret document never intended for 
other eyes than his own, describes Putnam as 
little known outside of a definite circle of friends. 
If this militated against his being appointed 
commander-in-chief of the American armies 
(for which honor General " Mad " Anthony 
Wayne was named), it made the man the more 
beloved and helpful. Not seeking in convivial 
ways the friendship of the notables of his time, 
Rufus Putnam went about the commonplace 
affairs of his conscientious life, doing good ; yet in 
the most critical hour in the history of the North- 
west it was to Putnam that Washington turned 
in confidence and hope. In the formation of the 
Ohio Company, in the emigration from New 
England, in the hard experiences of hewing out 
homes and clearings on the Ohio, and in the 
humble, wearing vicissitudes of life on the 
tumultuous frontier, the resolution, tact, and 



34 Pilots of the Republic 

patient charity of this plain hero made him one of 
the great men in the annals of our western land. 

This Ohio Company of Associates made the first 
settlement in the territory northwest of the River 
Ohio, from which were created the five great 
States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and 
Wisconsin. In the actual peopling of that region 
no one man, perhaps, exerted the influence of 
Rufus Putnam ; and though, as a company, the 
Associates never were able to keep their contract 
with the Government, the great value of the 
movement led by Putnam was recognized, as 
Virginia and North Carolina recognized Hender- 
son's influence to the southward, and Congress 
agreed to an easy settlement. 

The empire of the Ohio Basin being thrown 
open to the world by the armies of pioneers in- 
spired by Washington and led by such men as 
Henderson and Putnam, a great factor in its 
occupation were the men who succeded Washing- 
ton in carrying out his plan for opening avenues 
of immigration. Three great routes to the West, 
and their projectors, call for notice in this phase 



Pilots of the Republic 35 

of our study. The rise of Henry Clay's famous 
National Road running from Cumberland, Mary- 
land, almost to St. Louis was a potent factor 
in the awakening of the West. It was the one 
great American highway ; it took millions of men 
and wealth into the West, and, more than any 
material object, " served to cement and save the 
Union." Three canals were factors in this great 
social movement, especially the Erie Canal, which 
was conceived by the inspiration of Morris and 
achieved by the patient genius of Clinton. As 
a promoter of the West, Thomas, father of our 
first railway, must be accounted of utmost im- 
portance. Is it not of interest that the famed 
Cumberland Road was not built to connect two 
large Eastern cities, or a seaport or river with a 
city ? It was built from the East into the West- 
ern wilderness — from a town but little known 
to an indefinite destination where the towns were 
hardly yet named. Its promoters were men of 
faith in the West, hopeful of its prosperity and 
anxious as to its loyalty. Now the same was 
singularly true of our first three great canals, the 



36 Pilots of the Republic 

Erie, the Chesapeake and Ohio, and the Pennsyl- 
vania. These were not built as avenues of com- 
merce between great Eastern cities, but rather 
from the East to the awakening West, to the 
infant hamlets of Buffalo and Pittsburg. And, 
still more remarkable, our first railways were not 
laid out between large Eastern cities, but from 
the East into that same country of the setting 
sun where the forests were still spreading and 
little villages were here and there springing up. 
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was distinctly 
promoted in the hope that Baltimore might re- 
tain the trade of the West which the canals then 
building seemed to be likely to take from her. 
It was their faith in the West that inspired all 
these men to the tasks they severally conceived 
and enthusiastically completed. It would hardly 
be possible to emphasize sufficiently the part 
played in the history of early America by this 
supremely momentous intuition of the westward 
advance of the Republic, the divine logic of that 
advance, and its immeasurable consequences. 



CHAPTER II 

Washington's Prescience of the Increased Value of Land in 
the West. — Diary of his Tour in the Basin of the Ohio. 
— His Plans for the Commercial Development of the 
West. — His Character as manifested in his Letters , 
Diaries^ and Memoranda. — His Military Advancement 
by the Influence of Lord Fairfax. — He serves at Fort 
Necessity^ " The Bloody Ford,"" and Fort Duquesne. — 
Marriage and Settlement at Mount Vernon. — His De- 
vice for taking up more Land than the Law allowed to 
one Man. — Washington not connected with any of 
the great Land Companies. — His Efl'orts to secure for 
his Soldiers the Bounty-land promised tliem. — His sixth 
Journey to view his own Purchases. — The Amount of 
his Landed Property. — His Leniency toxvard Poor Ten- 
ants. — The Intensity of his Business Energy. — The 
Present Value of his Lands. — His Dissatisfaction with 
the Results of his Land Specidations. — His Plan of 
American Internal Improvements. — The Treaty that 
secured to Virginia the Territory Smdh of the Ohio. — 
Washington's Personal Inspection of the Basins of the 
Ohio and Potomac. — He becomes President of the Poto- 
mac Company. — A Waterway secured from the Ohio 
to the Potomac. — The National Road from Cumberland, 
Md., to Wheeling on the Ohio. 



CHAPTER II 



WASHINGTON: THE PROMOTER OF WESTERN 
INVESTMENTS 

HAT story of 
personalen- 
deavor that had 
a part in build- 
ing up a new 
nation on this 
continent can 
appeal more 
strongly to us 
of the Middle 
West than that 
of Geo rge 

Washington's 
shrewd faith which led him first to invest heavily 

in Western lands and signally champion that re- 
gion as a field for exploitation ? Indeed the record 
of that man's prescience in realizing what the West 




40 Pilots of the Republic 

would become, how it would be quickly populated, 
and how rapidly its acres would increase in value, 
is one of the most remarkable single facts in his 
history. 

It is only because Washington became well 
known to a continent and a world as the leader 
of a people to freedom, that it has been easy to 
forget what a great man he still would have 
been had there been no Revolution and no Inde- 
pendence Day. How well known, for instance, 
is it that Washington was surveying lands on 
the Great Kanawha and Ohio rivers only four 
years before he received that remarkable ovation 
on his way to take command of the Continental 
Army under the Cambridge Elm? And how 
much attention has been given to Washington's 
tour into the Ohio Basin the very next year after 
the Revolutionary War to attempt to mark out 
a commercial route between the Virginia tide- 
water rivers and the Great Lakes by way of the 
Ohio and its tributaries ? Yet the diary of that 
trip is not only the longest single literary pro- 
duction we have in our first President's hand- 



Pilots of the Republic 41 

writing, but on examination it is found to be 
almost a State paper, pointing out with wonder- 
ful sagacity the line of national expansion and 
hinting more plainly than any other document, 
not excepting the famous Ordinance, of the great- 
ness of the Republic that was to be. 

Washington was possibly the richest man in 
America, and half his wealth lay west of the Alle- 
ghanies ; it has not seemed to be easy to remember 
that this statesman had a better knowledge of the 
West than any man of equal position and that he 
spent a large portion of his ripest years in plan- 
ning minutely for the commercial development 
of a territory then far less known to the common 
people of the country than Alaska is to us of to-day. 

To few men's private affairs has a nation had 
more open access than we have had to George 
Washington's. His journals, diaries, letters, 
and memoranda have been published broadcast, 
and the curious may learn, if they choose, the 
number of kerchiefs the young surveyor sent to 
his washerwoman long before his name was 
known outside his own county, or what the 



42 Pilots of the Republic 

butter bill was for a given month at the Execu- 
tive Mansion during the administration of our 
first President. Many men noted for their 
strength of personality and their patriotism have 
suffered some loss of character when their private 
affairs have been subjected to a rigid examination. 
Not so with Washington. It is a current legend 
in the neighborhood where he resided that he 
was exceedingly close-handed. This is not borne 
out in a study of his land speculations. Here is 
one of the interesting phases of the story of his 
business life, his generosity and his thoughtful- 
ness for the poor who crowded upon his far-away 
choice lands. Beyond this the study is of 
importance because it touches the most romantic 
phase of Western history, the mad struggle of 
those who participated in that great burst of 
immigration across the AUeghanies just before 
and just after the Revolutionary War. 

The hand of Providence cannot be more 
clearly seen in any human life than in Washing- 
ton's when he was turned from the sea and sent 
into the AUeghanies to survey on the south 



Pilots of the Republic 43 

branch of the Potomac for Lord Fairfax, in 1748 ; 
it seemed unimportant, perhaps, at the moment 
whether the youth should follow his brother 
under Admiral Vernon or plunge into the forests 
alonsf the Potomac. But had his mother's wish 
not been obeyed our West would have lost a 
champion among a thousand. As it was, Wash- 
ington, in the last two years of the first half 
of the eighteenth century, began to study the 
forests, the mountains, and the rivers in the rear 
of the colonies. The mighty silences thrilled 
the young heart, the vastness of the stretching 
wilderness made him sober and thoughtful. He 
came in touch with great problems at an early 
and impressionable age, and they became at once 
hfe-problems with him. The perils and hard- 
ships of frontier life, the perplexing questions of 
lines and boundaries, of tomahawk and squatter 
claims, the woodland arts that are now more than 
lost, the ways and means of life and travel in the 
borderland, the customs of the Indians and their 
conceptions of right and wrong, all these and 
more were the problems this tall boy was 



44 Pilots of the Republic 

fortunately made to face as the first step toward 
a life of unparalleled activity and sacrifice. 

The influence of Lord Fairfax, whom he served 
faithfully, now soon brought about Washington's 
appointment as one of four adjutant-generals of 
Virginia. In rapid order he pushed to the front. 
In 1753 his governor sent him on the memorable 
journey to the French forts near Lake Erie, and 
in the following year he led the Virginia regiment 
and fought and lost the Fort Necessity cam- 
paign. The next year he marched with Brad- 
dock to the " Bloody Ford " of the Monongahela. 
For three years after this terrible defeat Wash- 
ington was busy defending the Virginia frontier, 
and in 1758 he went to the final conquest of 
Fort Duquesne with the dying but victorious 
Forbes. 

Having married Martha Custis, the young 
colonel now settled down at Mount Vernon, and 
his diary of 1760 shows how closely he applied 
himself to the management of his splendid estate. 
But the forests in and beyond the Alleghanies, 
which he had visited on five occasions before he 



Pilots of the Republic 45 

was twenty-six years of age, were closely identi- 
fied with his plans, and it is not surprising that as 
early as 1767 we find the young man WTiting a 
hasty letter concerning Western investments to 
AVilliam Crawford, a comrade-in-arms in the cam- 
paign of 1758, who lived near the spot where 
Braddock's old road crossed the Youghiogheny 
River. 

From this letter, written September 21, 1767, 
it is clear that Washington had determined to 
make hea^'y investments. " My plan is to secure 
a good deal of land," he wrote. He desired land 
in Pennsylvania as near Pittsburg as possible ; 
if the law did not allow one man to take up 
several thousand acres, Crawford was requested 
to make more than one entry, the total to 
aggregate the desired amount. As to quality, 
Washington was to the point. 

" It will be easy for you to conceive that ordinaiy or 
even middling lands would never answer my purpose or 
expectation ; . . . a tract to please me must be rich . . . 
and, if possible, level." 



46 Pilots of the Republic 

As to location, he was not concerned : 

" For my own part, I should have no objection to a 
grant of land upon the Ohio, a good way below Pittsburg, 
but would first willingly secure some valuable tracts nearer 
at hand." 

Washington correctly estimated the purpose 
and effectiveness of the King's proclamation of 
1763. This proclamation, at the close of Pon- 
tiac 's rebellion, declared that no land should be 
settled beyond the heads of the Atlantic waters. 
In the same letter he said : 

" I can never look upon that proclamation in any other 
light (but I say this between ourselves) than as a tem- 
porary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians. . . . 
Any person, therefore, who neglects the present opportun- 
ity of hunting out good lands, and in some measure mark- 
ing and distinguishing them for his own, in order to keep 
others from settling them, will never regain it." 

Washington was first and foremost in the field 
and intended to make the most of his opportuni- 
ties. He wrote : * 

" If the scheme I am now proposing to you were known, 
it might give alarm to others, and by putting them upon 



Pilots of the Repuhlic 47 

a plan of the same nature, before we could lay^ a proper 
foundation for success ourselves, set the different interests 
clashing, and, probably, in the end overturn the whole. 
All this may be avoided by a silent management, and the 
operation carried on by you under the guise of hunting 
game." 

Crawford accordingly took tracts for Washing- 
ton near his own lands on the Youghiogheny, 
costing "from a halfpenny to a penny an acre." 

Note that at this early day (1767), almost all 
the land between the Youghiogheny and Mon- 
ongahela rivers — the country through which 
Braddock's Road ran — was already taken up. 
A large tract on Chartier's Creek was secured 
by Crawford for his friend. Within five years 
Washington had come into the additional posses- 
sion of the historic tract of two hundred and 
thirty-seven acres known as Great Meadows, — 
whereon he had fought his first battle and signed 
the first and only capitulation of his life, — and 
the splendid river-lands known to-day as " Wash- 
ington's Bottoms," on the Ohio near Wheeling 
and Parkersburg, West Virginia, and below. 



48 Pilots of the Republic 

It is a very interesting fact that Washington 
did not belong to any of the great land com- 
panies which, one after another, sought to gain 
and hold great tracts of land, except the Missis- 
sippi Company which did not materialize. His 
brothers were members of the Ohio Company 
which in 1749 secured a grant of two hundred 
thousand acres between the Monongahela and 
Kanawha rivers. The company was never able 
to people and hold its territory, and the pro- 
prietors each lost heavily. It is a little strange 
that Washington had nothing to do with Wal- 
pole's Grant, the Transylvania Company, or the 
later Ohio, Scioto, and Symmes companies. 

What might be considered an exception to 
this rule was the body of men (among whom 
Washington was a generous, fearless leader) 
which sought to secure for the Virginia soldiers 
of the Fort Necessity campaign the bounty-land 
promised them by Governor Dinwiddle in 1754. 
Year after year, for twenty years, Washington 
was continually besieged by the soldiers he led 
West in 1754 or their relatives, who implored 



Pilots of the Republic 49 

his aid in securing the grant of land promised, 
and there is no more interesting phase of his Ufe 
during these years than his patient persistence in 
compelling Virginia to make good her solemn 
pledge. To impatient and impertinent men 
such as Colonel Mercer he wrote scathing re- 
bukes ; to helpless widows and aged veterans 
he sent kind messages of hope and cheer. 

The trouble was that everybody was claiming 
the land beyond the Alleghanies ; the Ohio Com- 
pany was fighting for its rights until the London 
agent questionably formed a merger with the 
Walpole Grant speculators. This company had 
claimed all the land between the Monongahela 
and the Kanawha. Washington, accordingly, 
had attempted to secure the two hundred thou- 
sand acres for his Fort Necessity comrades on 
the western shore of the Kanawha. In 1770 he 
made his sixth western journey in order to view 
his own purchases and make a beginning in the 
business of securing the soldiers' lands. He 
left Mount Vernon October 5 and reached 
William Crawford's, on the Youghiogheny, on 

4 



50 Pilots of the Republic 

the thirteenth. On the sixteenth Washington 
visited his sixteen-hundred acre tract near by 
and was pleased with it. On the third of 
November he blazed four trees on the Ohio, 
near the mouth of the Great Kanawha. He 
wrote : 

" At the beginning of the bottom above the junction of 
the rivers, and at the mouth of a branch on the east side, 
I marked two maples, an elm, and hoop-wood tree, as a 
corner of the soldiers'* land (if we can get it), intending to 
take all the bottom fi'om hence to the rapids in the Great 
Bend into one survey. I also marked at the mouth of 
another run lower down on the west side, at the lower end 
of the long bottom, an ash and hoop-wood for the be- 
ginning of another of the soldiers' surveys, to extend up 
so as to include all the bottom in a body on the west 
side." 

From this time on Crawford was busy survey- 
ing for Washington, either privately or in be- 
half of the soldiers' lands, until the outbreak of 
Dunmore's War in 1774. For these bounty- 
land surveys, Washington was particularly atten- 
tive, writing Crawford frequently " in behalf of 
the whole officers and soldiers, and beg of you 



Pilots of the Republic 51 

to be attentive to it, as I think our interest is 
deeply concerned in the event of your dispatch.' 
When Walpole 's Grant was confirmed by King 
George, Washington greatly feared the loss of 
the lands promised to himself and his comrades 
of 1754. His own share was five thousand acres, 
and he had purchased an equal amount from 
others who, becoming hopeless, offered their 
claims for sale. This grant was bounded on the 
west by the old war-path which ran from the 
mouth of the Scioto River to Cumberland Gap. 
Accordingly, in September, 1773, Washington 
wrote Crawford to go down the Ohio below the 
Scioto. Washington did not know then that the 
purchasers of Walpole 's Grant had agreed to set 
apart two hundred thousand acres for the heroes 
of 1754). It is significant that he was particular 
to avoid all occasion for conflicting claims ; he 
originally wanted the soldiers' surveys to be 
made beyond the Ohio Company's Grant ; later 
beyond the Walpole Grant. And while war and 
other causes put a disastrous end to the work of 
the promoters of all the various land companies 



52 Pilots of the Republic 

with which Washington had nothing to do, the 
soldiers' lands were saved to them, and all re- 
ceived their shares. Washington also retained 
his private lands surveyed by Crawford, and 
owned most of them in 1799, when he died. In 
1784, Washington had patents for thirty thousand 
acres and surveys for ten thousand more. 
Briefly, his possessions may be described as ten 
thousand acres on the south bank of the Ohio 
between AVheeling and Point Pleasant, West 
Virginia, and twenty thousand acres in the 
Great Kanawha Valley, beginning three miles 
above its mouth, "on the right and left of the 
river, and bounded thereby forty-eight miles and 
a half" 

Washington's ethics and his enterprise with 
reference to his Western speculations were both 
admirable, but we can only hint of them here. 
He was strict with himself and with others, but 
he knew how to be lenient when leniency would 
not harm the recipient. To his later agent, 
Thomas Freeman (Crawford was captured and 
put to death by the Indians in 1782), he wrote 



Pilots of the Republic 53 

in 1785 : " Where acts of Providence interfere to 
disable a tenant, I would be lenient in the ex- 
action of rent, but when the cases are otherwise, 
I will not be put off; because it is on these my 
own expenditures depend, and because an ac- 
cumulation of undischarged rents is a real injury 
to the tenant." While his agents were ordered 
to use all legal precautions against alloAving his 
lands to be usurped by others, Washington was 
particular that needy people, stopping tempor- 
arily, should not be driven off; and he was ex- 
ceedingly anxious from first to last that no 
lands should be taken up for him that were any- 
wise claimed by others. It is a fact that Wash- 
ington had few disputes in a day when disputes 
over lands and boundaries were as common as 
sunrise and sunset. No landholder in the West 
had so little trouble in proportion to the amount 
of land owned. 

The intensity of W^ashington's business energy 
is not shown more plainly than by his enterprise 
in finding and exploiting novelties. One day 
he was studying the question of rotation of 



54 Pilots of the Republic 

crops ; the next found him laboring all day with 
his blacksmith fashioning a newfangled plough. 
The next day he spent, perhaps, in studying a 
plan of a new machine invented in Europe to haul 
trees bodily out of the ground, an invention 
which meant something to a man who owned 
thirty thousand acres of primeval forest. He 
ordered his London agent to send on one of 
these machines regardless of cost, if they were 
really able to do the feats claimed. Again he 
was writing Tilghman at Philadelphia concern- 
ing the possibility and advisabiUty of importing 
palatines from Europe, with which to settle his 
Western farms. Now he was examining veins of 
coal along the Youghiogheny and experimenting 
with it, or studying the location of salt-springs 
and the manufacture of salt, which in the West 
was twice dearer than flour. A whole essay could 
be devoted to Washington's interest in mineral 
springs at Saratoga, Rome, New York, and in 
the West, and to his plan outlined to the presi- 
dent of the Continental Congress to have the 
United States retain possession of all lands lying 



Pilots of the Republic 55 

immediately about them. We do not know who 
built the first grist-mill west of the Alleghanies, 
but it is doubtful if there was another save 
Washington's at Perryopolis, Fayette County, 
Pennsylvania, before the Revolutionary War. 
** 1 assure you," wrote Crawford, " it is the best 
mill I ever saw anywhere, although I think one 
of a less value would have done as well." It is 
the boast of Ohioans that the millstones for the 
first mill in the old Northwest were " packed " 
over the mountains from Connecticut. Wash- 
ington might have boasted, a score of years 
earlier, that he had found his millstones right in 
the Alleghanies, and they were " equal to English 
burr," according to his millwright. The mill 
which is still in operation on Washington's Run 
is on the original site of the one built by him in 
1775. Portions of the original structure remain 
in the present mill, and it is known far and wide 
by the old name. The water-power, which is no 
longer relied upon except during wet seasons, 
still follows the same mill-race used in Revolu- 
tionary days, and the reconstructed dam is on 



56 Pilots of the Republic 

the old site. The improvements on Washing- 
ton's plantation here, overseer's house, slave 
quarters, etc, were situated near Plant Xo. 2 of 
the Washington Coal and Coke Company. It is 
known that Washington became interested in the 
coal outcropping here, but it is safe to say that 
he little dreamed that the land he purchased 
with that lying contiguous to it would within 
a century be valued at twenty million dollars. 
In view of the enormous value of this territory, 
it is exceedingly interesting to know that Wash- 
ington was its first owner, and that he found 
coal there nearly a century and a half ago. 

In 1784 Washington issued a circular oflfering 
his Western lands to rent : 

'• These lands may be had on three tenures : First, until 
January. 1790, and no longer. Second, until January, 
1795, renewable every ten years for ever. Third, for nine 
hnndred and ninety-nine years." 

The conditions included clearing five new 
acres every year for each hundred leased and 
the erection of bmldinors within the time of lease. 



Pilots of the Republic 57 

The staple commodity was to be medium of 
exchange. The seventh condition is interesting : 

" These conditions kc, being common to the leases of 
three different tenures, the rent of the first, will be Four 
Pounds per annum, for every hundred acres contained in 
the lease, and proportionably for a greater or lesser quan- 
tity ; of the second, One Shilling for every acre contained 
in the lease until the year 1795, One Shilling and Six- 
pence for the like quantity afterwards till the year 1S15, 
and the Hke increase per acre for every ten years, until 
the rent amounts to and shall have remained at Five 
ShiUings for the ten years nest ensuing, after which it is 
to increase Threepence per acre every ten years for ever ; 
of the Third, Two ShiUings for every acre therein con- 
tained, at which it will stand for nine hundred and ninety- 
nine years, the term for which it is granted.~ 

Five years before liis death Washington re- 
solved to dispose of his Western hmds. The 
investments had not been so profitable as he had 
hoped. As early as June 16, 1794. he wTote 
Presley Ne^•ille: 

"From the experience of many years. I have found 
distant property in land more pregnant of perplexities 
than profit. I have therefore resolved to sell all I hold 



58 Pilots of the Republic 

on the Western waters, if I can obtain the prices which I 
conceive their quahty, their situation, and other advan- 
tages would authorize me to expect." 

A circular advertising his Western lands was 
issued in Philadelphia, dated February 1, 1796 
It described 32,317 acres in Pennsylvania, Vir- 
ginia, and Kentucky for sale ; the terms were 
one-fourth payment down, and the remainder to 
be paid in five years with interest " annually and 
punctually paid." 

With this story of Washington's acquaintance 
with the West and his speculations there in 
mind, it is now possible to take up, knowingly, 
the great result to which they led — the first 
grand plan of American internal improvements, 
of which Washington was the father. 

As early as 1754, Washington, then just come 
of age, made a detailed study of the Potomac 
River, and described in a memorandum all the 
difiiculties and obstructions to be overcome in 
rendering that river navigable from tide-water to 
Fort Cumberland (Cumberland, Maryland). At 
the time of Washington's entrance into the 



Pilots of the Republic 59 

House of Burgesses in 1760, the matter of a 
way of communication between the colonies and 
the territory then conquered jfrom France be- 
yond the AUeghanies was perhaps uppermost in 
his mind, but various circumstances compelled a 
postponement of all such plans, particularly the 
outrageous proclamation of 1763, which was 
intended to repress the Western movement. 

By 1770 conditions were changed. In 1768 
the Treaty of Fort Stanwix had nominally se- 
cured to Virginia all the territory south of the 
Ohio River, the very land from which the pro- 
clamation of 1763 excluded her. 

On July 20 of this year, Washington wi'ote to 
Thomas Johnson, the first State Governor of 
Maryland, suggesting that the project of open- 
ing the Potomac River be "recommended to 
the public notice upon a more enlarged plan 
[i. e.f including a portage to the Ohio Basin] and 
as a means of becoming the channel of convey- 
ance of the extensive and valuable trade of a 
rising empire." Johnson had written Washing- 
ton concerning the navigation of the Potomac ; 



60 Pilots of the Republic 

in this reply Washington prophesied the failure 
of any plan to improve the Potomac that did 
not include a plan to make it an avenue of 
communication between the East and the West. 
He also prophesied that, if this were not done, 
Pennsylvania or New York would improve the 
opportunity of getting into commercial touch 
with that "rising empire" beyond the Alle- 
ghanies, " a tract of country which," he wrote, 
"is unfolding to our view, the advantages of 
which are too great, and too obvious, I should 
think, to become the subject of serious debate, 
but which, through ill-timed parsimony and 
supineness, may be wrested from us and con- 
ducted through other channels, such as the 
Susquehanna." 

These words of Washington's had a significance 
contained in no others uttered in that day, hint- 
ing of a greater America of which few besides 
this man were dreaming. They sounded through 
the years foretelling the wonder of our time, the 
making of the empire of the Mississippi Basin. 
Far back in his youth, this man had sounded 



Pilots of the Republic 61 

the same note of alarm and enthusiasm : "A 
pusillanimous behavior now will ill suit the 
times," he cried to Governor Dinwiddie just after 
Braddock's defeat, when a red tide of pillage 
and murder was setting over the mountains upon 
Virginia and Pennsylvania. During the fifteen 
years now past Washington had visited the West, 
and understood its promise and its needs, and 
now the binding of the East and the West 
became at once his dearest dream. 

Believing the time had come Washington, in 
1774, brought before the Virginia House of 
Burgesses a grand plan of communication which 
called for the improvement of the Potomac and 
the building of a connection from that river to 
one of the southwest tributaries of the Ohio. 
Only the outbreak of the Revolution could have 
thwarted the measure ; in those opening hours of 
war it was forgotten, and it was not thought 
of again until peace was declared seven years 
later. 

We know something of Washington's life in 
those years — his ceaseless application to details. 



62 Pilots of the Republic 

his total abandonment of the life he had learned 
to know and love on the Mount Vernon farms, 
the thousand perplexities, cares, and trials which 
he met so patiently and nobly. But in those 
days of stress and hardship the cherished plan of 
youth and manhood could not be forgotten. 
Even before peace was declared, Washington 
left his camp at Newburg, and at great personal 
risk made a tour though the Mohawk Valley, ex- 
amining the portages between the Mohawk and 
Wood Creek, at Rome, New York, and between 
Lake Otsego and the Mohawk at Canajoharie. 
These routes by the Susquehanna and Mohawk 
to the Lakes were the rival routes of the James 
and Potomac westward, and Washington was 
greatly interested in them. He was no narrow 
partisan. Returning from this trip, he wrote 
the Chevalier de Chastellux from Princeton, 
October 12, 1783 : 

" Prompted by these actual observations, I could not 
help taking a more extensive view of the vast inland navi- 
gation of these United States and could not but be struck 
with the immense extent and importance of it, and with 



Pilots of the Republic 63 

the soodness of that Providence which has dealt its favors 
to us with so profuse a hand. Would to God we may have 
wisdom enough to improve them ! I shall not rest con- 
tented till I have explored the western country, and 
traversed those lines, or great part of them, which have 
given bounds to a new empire." 

There is something splendid suggested by these 
words. Though he knew, perhaps better than 
any man, the pitiful condition of the country, 
there is here no note of despair, but rather a cry 
of enthusiasm. The leader of the armies was now 
to become a leader of a people, and at the out- 
set his eye is uplifted and his faith great. With 
prophetic genius his face, at the close of his ex- 
hausting struggle, is turned toward the West. 
It is certain that Washington could not have 
known what a tremendous influence the new 
West was to have in the perplexing after hours 
of that critical period of our history. Perhaps 
he judged better what it would be partly for the 
reason that its very existence had furnished a 
moral support to him in times of darkness and 
despair; he always remembered those valleys 



64 Pilots of the Republic 

and open meadows where the battles of his boy- 
hood had been fought, and the tradition that he 
would have led the Continental army thither in 
case of final defeat may not be unfounded. 
Whether he knew aught of the wholesome part 
the West was to play in our national develop- 
ment or not, two things are very clear to-day : 
the West, and the opportunity to occupy it, 
were the " main chance " of the spent colonies 
at the end of that war ; and if Washington had 
known all that we know at this day, he certainly 
could not have done much more than he did to 
bring about the welding and cementing of the 
East and the West, which now meant to each 
other more than ever before. He again utters 
practically the old cry of his youth : " A pusil- 
lanimous behavior now will ill suit the times." 
And the emphasis is on the " now." 

It is not surprising, therefore, to find that 
Washington, soon after reaching Mount Vernon, 
at the close of the war, determined on another 
western journey. The ostensible reason for the 
trip was to look after his lands, but from the 



Pilots of the Republic 65 

journal of the traveller it is easy to see that 
the important result of the trip was a personal 
inspection of the means of communication be- 
tween the various branches of the Ohio and the 
Potomac, which so nearly interlock in south- 
western Pennsylvania and northeastern West 
Virginia. It must be remembered that in that 
day river navigation was considered the most 
practical form of transportation. All the rivers 
of Virginia, great and small, were the highways 
of the tobacco industry ; the rivers of any colony 
were placed high in an inventory of the colony's 
wealth, not only because they implied fertility* 
but because they were the great avenues of trade. 
The first important sign of commercial awakening 
in the interior of the colonies was the improve- 
ment of the navigable rivers and the highways. 

In less than thirty-three days Washington trav- 
elled nearly seven hundred miles on horseback 
in what is now Pennsylvania and West Vir- 
ginia.^ That he did not confine his explorations 

1 Washington's diary of this journey is printed in full in Hulbert, 
" Washington and the West," 27-105. 



6Q Pilots of the Republic 

to the travelled ways is evident from his itin- 
erary through narrow, briery paths, and his re- 
maining for at least one night upon a Virginian 
hillside, where he slept, as in earlier years, be- 
side a camp-fire and covered only by his cloak. 
His original intention was to go to the Great 
Kanawha, where much of his most valuable 
land lay, and after transacting his business, 
to return by way of the New River into Vir- 
ginia. But it will be remembered that after 
the Revolutionary War closed in the East, the 
bloodiest of battles were yet to be fought in 
the West ; and even in 1784, such was the con- 
dition of affairs on the frontier, it did not seem 
safe for Washington to go down the Ohio. He 
turned, therefore, to the rough lands at the head 
of the Monongahela, in the region of Morgan- 
town, West Virginia, and examined carefully 
all evidence that could be secured touching the 
practicability of opening a great trunk line of 
communication between East and West by way 
of the Potomac and Monongahela rivers. The 
navigation of the headwaters of the two streams 



Pilots of the Republic 67 

was the subject of special inquiry, and then, 
in turn, the most practicable route for a portage 
or a canal between them. 

From any point of view this hard, dangerous 
tour of exploration must be considered most 
significant. Washington had led his ragged 
armies to victory, England had been fought 
completely to a standstill, and the victor had 
returned safely to the peace and quiet of his 
Mount Vernon farms amid the applause of two 
continents. And then, in a few weeks, we find 
the same man with a single attendant beating 
his way through the tangled trails in hilly West 
Virginia, inspecting for himself and making 
dihgent inquiry from all he met concerning the 
practicability of the navigation of the upper 
]\Ionongahela and the upper Potomac. Russia 
can point to Peter's laboring in the Holland ship- 
yards with no more pride than that with which 
we can point to Washington pushing his tired 
horse through the wilderness about Dunkard's 
Bottom on the Cheat River in 1784. If through 
the knowledge and determination of Peter the 



68 Pilots of the Republic 

Russian Empire became strong, then as truly 
from the clear- visioned inspiration of Washington 
came the first attempts to bind our East and 
West into one — a union on which depended 
the very life of the American Republic. Here 
and now we find this man firmly believing truths 
and theories which became the adopted beliefs 
of a whole nation but a few years later. 

Returning to Mount Vernon, Washington 
immediately penned one of the most interesting 
and important letters written in America during 
his day and generation, — " that classic, Wash- 
ington's Letter to Benjamin Harrison, 1784," as 
it is styled in the *' Old South Leaflets." In 
this letter he voices passionately his plea for 
binding a fragmentary nation together by the 
ties of interstate communion and commerce. 
His plan included the improvement of the 
Potomac and one of the heads of the Monon- 
gahela, and building a solid portage highway 
between these waterways. His chief argument 
was that Vu'ginia ought to be the first in the 
field to secure the trade of the West; with 




George Washington 



Pilots of the Republic 69 

keener foresight than any other man of his day, 
Washington saw that the trans- Alleghany empire 
would be filled with people "faster than any 
other ever was, or any one would imagine." 
Not one of all the prophecies uttered during 
the infancy of our Republic was more marvel- 
lously fulfilled. The various means by which 
this was accomplished changed more rapidly 
than any one could have supposed, but every 
change brought to pass more quickly that very 
marvel which he had foretold to a wondering 
people only half awake to its greater duty. His 
final argument was prophetically powerful : he 
had done what he could to lead his people to 
freedom from proprietaries and lords of trade. 
How free now would they be ? 
He wrote : 

"No well informed Mind need be told, that the flanks 
and rear of the United territory are possessed by other 
powers, and formidable ones too — nor how necessary it 
is to apply the cement of interest to bind all parts of it 
together, by one indissoluble bond — particularly the 
middle states with the Country immediately back of them 



70 Pilots of the Republic 

— for what ties let me ask, should we have upon those 
people ; and how entirely unconnected sho^ we be with 
them if the Spaniards on their right or great Britain on 
their left, instead of throwing stumbling blocks in their 
way as they now do, should invite their trade and seek 
alliances with them ? — What, when they get strength, 
which will be sooner than is generally imagined (from the 
emigration of Foreignei's who can have no predeliction 
for us, as well as from the removal of our own Citizens) 
may be the consequence of their having formed such 
connections and alliances, requires no uncommon foresight 
to predict. 

" The Western Settlers — from my own observation — 
stand as it w^ere on a pivet — the touch of a feather would 
almost incline them any way — they looked down the 
Mississippi until the Spaniards (very impolitically I think 
for themselves) threw difficulties in the way, and for no 
other reason that I can conceive than because they glided 
gently down the stream, without considering perhaps the 
tedeousness of the voyage back, & the time necessary to 
perform it in ; — and because they have no other means 
of coming to us but by a long land transportation & 
unimproved Roads. 

" A combination of circumstances make the present 
conjuncture more favorable than any other to fix the trade 
of the Western Country to our Markets. — The jealous 
& untoward disposition of the Spaniards on one side, and 



Pilots of the Republic 71 

the private views of some individuals coinciding with the 
policy of the Court of G. Britain on the other, to retain 
the posts of Oswego, Niagara, Detroit Sic^ (which tho' 
done under the letter of the treaty is certainly an infrac- 
tion of the Spirit of it, & injurious to the Union) may be 
improved to the greatest advantage by this State if she 
would open her arms, & embrace the nieans which are 
necessary to establish it — The way is plain, & the ex- 
pence, comparitively speaking deserves not a thought, 
so gi'eat would be the prize — The Western Inhabitants 
would do their part towards accomplishing it, — weak, as 
they now are, they would, I am persuaded meet us half 
way rather than be driven into the arms of, or be in any 
wise dependent upon, foreigners ; the consequences of 
which would be, a seperation, or a War. — 

" The way to avoid both, happily for us, is easy, and 
dictated by our clearest interest. — It is to open a wide 
door, and make a smooth way for the Produce of that 
Country to pass to our Markets before the trade may get 
into another channel — this, in my judgment, would dry 
up the other Sources ; or if any part should flow down 
the Mississippi, from the Falls of the Ohio, in Vessels 
which may be built — fitted for Sea — & sold with their 
Cargoes, the proceeds I have no manner of doubt, will 
return this way ; & that it is better to prevent an evil 
than to rectify a mistake none can deny — commercial, 
connections, of all others, are most difficult to dissolve — if 



72 Pilots of the Republic 

we wanted proof of this, look to the avidity with which 
we are renewing, after a total suspension of eight years, our 
corrispondence with Great Britain ; — So, if we are supine, 
and suffer without a struggle the Settlers of the Western 
Country to form commercial connections with the Span- 
iards, Britons, or with any of the States in the Union 
we shall find it a difficult matter to dissolve them altho' 
a better communication should, thereafter, be presented 
to them — time only could effect it ; such is the force 

of habit ! — 

" Rumseys discovery of working Boats against stream, by 

mechanical powers principally, may not only be considered 
as a fortunate invention for these States in general but as 
one of those circumstances which have combined to render 
the present epoche favorable above all others for securing 
(if we are disposed to avail ourselves of them) a large por- 
tion of the produce of the Western Settlements, and of 
the Fur and Peltry of the Lakes, also. — the importation 
of which alone, if there were no political considerations 
in the way, is immense. — 

" It may be said, perhaps, that as the most direct Routs 
from the Lakes to the Navigation of Potomack are through 
the State of Pensylvania; — and the inter^ of that State 
opposed to the extension of the Waters of Monongahela, 
that a communication cannot be had either by the 
Yohiogany or Cheat River; — but herein I differ. — an 
application to this purpose would, in my opinion, place 



Pilots of the Republic 73 

the Legislature of that Commonwealth in a very delicate 
situation. — That it would not be pleasing I can readily 
conceive, but that they would refuse their assent, I am by 
no means clear in. — There is, in that State, at least one 
hundred thousand Souls West of the Laurel hill, who are 
groaning under the inconveniences of a long land trans- 
portation. — They are wishing, indeed looking, for the 
extension of inland Navigation ; and if this can not be 
made easy for them to Philadelphia — at any rate it must 
be lengthy — they will seek a Mart elsewhere ; and none 
is so convenient as that which offers itself through 
Yohiogany or Cheat River. — the certain consequences 
therefore of an attempt to restrain tbe extension of the 
Navigation of these Rivers, (so consonant with the interest 
of these people) or to impose any extra : duties upon 
the exports, or imports, to, or from another State, would 
be a seperation of the Western Settlers from the old & 
more interior government ; towards which there is not 
wanting a disposition at this moment in the former." 

Thus the old dream of the youth is brought for- 
ward again by the thoughtful, sober man ; these 
words echo the spirit of Washington's whole 
attitude toward the West — its wealth of buried 
riches, its commercial possibilities, its swarm- 
ing colonies of indomitable pioneers. Here 



74 Pilots of the Republic 

was the first step toward solving that second 
most serious problem that faced the young 
nation: How can the great West be held and 
made to strengthen the Union? France and 
England had owned and lost it. Could the new 
master, this infant Republic, " one nation to- 
day, thirteen to-morrow," do better? Ay, but 
England and France had no seer or adviser so 
wise as this man. This letter from Washington 
to Harrison was our nation's pioneer call to the 
vastly better days (poor as they now seem) of 
improved river navigation, the first splendid 
economic advance that heralded the day of the 
canal and the national highway. For fifty years, 
until President Jackson vetoed the Maysville 
Road Bill, the impetus of this appeal, made in 
1784, was of vital force in forming our national 
economic policies. This letter has frequently 
been pointed to as the inspiring influence which 
finally gave birth to the Erie Canal and the 
Cumberland National Road. 

The immediate result of this agitation was the 
formation of the celebrated Potomac Company 



Pilots of the Republic 75 

under joint resolutions passed by Virginia and 
Maryland. Washington was at once elected to 
the presidency of this company, an office he 
filled until his election to the presidency of the 
United States five years later (1789). The plan 
of the Potomac Company was to improve the 
navigation of the Potomac to the most advan- 
tageous point on its headwaters and build a 
twenty-mile portage road to Dunkard's Bottom 
on the Cheat River. With the improvement of 
the Cheat and Monongahela rivers, a waterway, 
witli a twenty-mile portage, was secured from 
the Ohio to tide-water on the Potomac. 

Washington's plan, however, did not stop here. 
This proposed line of communication was not to 
stop at the Ohio, but the nortiiern tributaries of 
that river were to be explored and rendered navi- 
gable, and portage roads were to be built be- 
tween them and the interlocking streams which 
flowed into the Great Lakes. With the im- 
provement of these waterways, in their turn, 
a complete trunk line of communication was 
thus established from the Lakes to the sea. 



76 Pilots of the Republic 

Washington spent no little time in endeavoring 
to secure the best possible information concern- 
ing the nature of the northern tributaries of the 
Ohio, the Beaver, the Muskingum, the Scioto, 
and the Miami, and of the lake streams, the 
Grand, the Cuyahoga, the Sandusky, and the 
Maumee. It was because of such conceptions 
as these that all the portage paths of the terri- 
tory northwest of the Ohio River were declared 
by the famous Ordinance of 1787, " common 
highways forever free." 

Tiie Potomac Company fared no better than 
the other early companies which attempted to 
improve the lesser waterways of America before 
the method of slackwater navigation was dis- 
covered. It made, however, the pioneer effort 
in a cause which meant more to its age than we 
can readily imagine to-day, and in time it built the 
great and successful Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, 
as the early attempts to render the Mohawk 
River navigable were the first chapters in the 
history of the famed Erie Canal. These efforts 
of Washington's constitute likewise the first 



Pilots of the Republic 77 

chapter of the building of our one great national 
road. This highway, begun in 1811, and com- 
pleted to the Ohio River in 1818, was practically 
the portage path which was so important a link 
in Washington's comprehensive plan. Its start- 
ing point was Cumberland, Maryland, on the 
Potomac, and it led to Brownsville, Pennsyl- 
vania, on the IMonongahela, and Wheeling on 
the Ohio. All of these points were famous 
ports in the days when that first burst of immi- 
gration swept over the Alleghanies. Washing- 
ton's plan for a bond of union between East and 
West was also the first chapter of the story of 
throwing the first railway across the Alleghanies. 
" I consider this among the most important acts 
of my life," said Charles Carroll, of CarroUton, 
when with the stroke of a pen he laid the first 
foundation for the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, 
" second only to my signing the Declaration of 
Independence, if even it be second to that." 

Washington's dream of an empire of united 
States bound together by a " chain of federal 
union " was enlarged and modified by the 



78 Pilots of the Republic 

changing needs of a nation, but in its vital essence 
it was never altered. " It would seem," wrote the 
late Herbert B. Adams, " as though, in one way 
or another, all lines of our public policy lead 
back to Washington, as all roads lead to Rome." 
And yet, after all, I believe there are other 
words which sound a note that should never die 
in the ears of his people, and those are his own 
youthful words, " A pusillanimous behavior now 
will ill suit the times." 

It is not easy to pass this subject without re- 
ferring to Washington's remarkably wise foresight 
with reference to the West and national growth 
which his experience with that part of the country 
gave him. True, he made some miscalculations, 
as when he expressed the opinion that New York 
would not improve her gi'cat route to the West 
(Mohawk River route) until the British had given 
up their hold on the Great Lakes ; he however 
pointed to that route as one of the most im- 
portant in America and hardly expected more 
from it than has been realized. In all phases of 
the awakening of the West — the Mississippi 



Pilots of the Republic 79 

question, the organization of the Northwest Ter- 
ritory, the formulating of the Ordinance of 1787 
("the legal outcome of Maryland's successful 
policy in advocating National Sovereignty over 
the Western Lands "), the ceding of lands to the 
National Government, the handling of the Indian 
problem — Washington's influence and knowledge 
were of paramount usefulness. Take these in- 
stances of his prescience as yet unmentioned : he 
suggested, in connection with the Potomac im- 
provement, the policy of exploration and surveys 
which our government has steadily adhered to 
since that day ; the Lewis and Clark expedition 
was a result of this policy advocated first by 
AVashington. Again, note Washington's singu- 
larly wise opinion on the separation of Kentucky 
from Virginia. Writing to Jefferson in 1785, he 
affirms that the general opinion in his part of Vir- 
ginia is unfavorable to the separation. " I have 
uniformly given it as mine," he wrote, " to meet 
them upon their own gi'ound, drq,w the best line, 
and make the best terms we can, and part good 
friends." And again, it is to the point to notice 



80 Pilots of the Republic 

Washington's far-seeing view of the progress and 
enterprise of the West in relation to commerce. 
Who before him ever had the temerity to suggest 
that ships would descend the Ohio River and 
sail for foreign ports ? ^ Yet he said this in 1784 
and had the audacity to add that, if so, the re- 
turn route of the proceeds of all sales thus result- 
ing would be over the Alleghany routes, which 
prophecy was fulfilled to the very letter. 

1 Hulbert, " Washington and the West," 195-6. 



CHAPTER III 

After Kxammat'ion Henderson is licensed to practise Law. — 
Defeat of the Shawnees hy the Virg'inians who claimed the 
Land south of the Ohio. — The Attention of Settlers 
directed to the Land beyond the Alleghanies. — Hender- 
son resolves to form a Transylvania Company and 
colonize Ken-ta-l^ee. — Buys from the Cherokees tiventy 
million Acres for ten thousand Pounds Sterling, March, 
1775. — Bands of Earlier Kentucky Settlers, fleeing from 
the Indians, meet Henderson'' s Colonists. — His Advance, 
led by Daniel Boone, attacked by Indians. — Henderson 
appeals in vain to the Fugitives to retu7-n with him. — 
Arrival of the Colonists at the Site of Boonesborough. 
— Henderson''s Anxiety regai-ding Virginia''s Attitude 
toward his Purchase. — 'TJie Governor of Virginia sends 
a Force which overthrows the Colony. — Actual Settlers 
on the Purchase permitted to remain in Title. — Grants 
of Land made to the Company by Virginia and North 
Carolina in Return for their Outlay. — TJie Moral Effect 
of this Proof that the West could be successfully colonized. 



CHAPTER III 



RICHARD HENDERSON: THE FOUNDER OF 
TRANSYLVANIA 

N early days in 
North Carolina, 
the young man 
who desired to 
practise law was 
compelled to get 
a certificate from 
the Chief Justice 
of the colony and 
to present this 
to the Governor ; 
the latter exam- 
ined the candi- 
date, and, becoming satisfied as to his attainments, 
granted him a license. Almost a century and a 
half ago a youth presented himself to the Gov- 
ernor of that colony with the proper credentials 




84 Pilots of the Republic 

and asked that he be examined for admission to 
the bar. His name, he affirmed, was Richard 
Henderson. His father, Samuel Henderson, had 
moved from Virginia in 1745, Richard's tenth 
year, and was now Sheriff of Granville County. 
Richard had assisted his father " in the business 
of the sherifFtry," and, with a few books, had 
picked up his knowledge of law. 

All this the Governor of North Carolina 
learned with indifference, we can imagine, as he 
looked the broad-shouldered lad up and down. 
It may be that North Carolina had now a surplus 
of pettifoggers ; at any rate the Governor was 
not granting licenses with a free hand to-day. 
The youth was not voluble, though his firm 
square jaw denoted both sturdiness and determi- 
nation ; perhaps he was somewhat abashed, as he 
well may have been, in the presence of the chief 
executive of the colony. 

" How long have you read law ? " asked the 
Governor. 

" A twelve-month," answered the lad. 

" And what books have you read ? " We can 



Pilots of the Repuhlic 85 

fancy there was the tinge of a sneer in these 
words. Henderson named his books. If the 
sneer was hidden until now, it instantly appeared 
as the young appHcant was bluntly told that it 
was nonsense for him to appear for an examina- 
tion after such a short period of study of such 
a limited number of books. 

The firm jaws were clinched and the gray eyes 
snapped as the rebuke was administered. De- 
spite his homely exterior and unpolished address 
the boy was already enough of a jurist to love 
justice and fair play ; if silent under many cir- 
cumstances, he could speak when the time 
demanded speech. 

" Sir," he replied, — and it can be believed there 
was a ring to the words, — "I am an applicant 
for examination : it is your duty to examine me ; 
if I am found worthy, I should be granted a 
license, and if not, I should be refused one, not 
before." 

We can be sure that the Governor bristled up 
at hearing his duty outlined to him from the lips 
of a country boy ; and it is no less probable that 



86 Pilots of the Republic 

as he began an examination it was wholly with 
the intention of demoralizing utterly the spirit of 
the youth who had spoken so boldly. The an- 
swers did not come so rapidly, probably, as the 
questions were asked, nor were they formulated 
with equal nicety ; but the substance was there, 
of sufficient quantity and sturdy quality, and in 
short order the Governor, who was a gentleman, 
found himself admiring the cool, discerning lad 
who had the confidence of his convictions. The 
license was granted and with it a bountiful degree 
of honest praise. 

Young Henderson immediately began the 
practice of law and was increasingly successful ; 
before the outbreak of the Revolution he was 
judge on the bench of the Superior Court of 
North Carolina. As early as 1774 North Caro- 
lina was convulsed in the Revolutionary contest, 
and in that year the Colonial government was 
abolished there. 

The student will search in vain to find the' 
earliest motive which led Judge Henderson to 
turn his eyes to the westward at this juncture. 



Pilots of the Republic 87 

Yet since he had come of age he had witnessed 
important events : the French and Indian War 
had been fought and won ; Pontiac's rebellion 
had been put down ; the famous treaty of Fort 
Stanwix, which gave Virginia all the territory 
between the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, had 
been signed ; and now in 1774-, when North 
Carolina was in the throes of revolution, 
Governor Dunmore of Virginia and General 
Andrew Lewis defeated the savage Shawnees 
who had attempted to challenge Virginia's right 
to the land south of the Ohio. The stories of 
the first explorers of the hinterland beyond the 
Alleghanies — Walker, Gist, Washington, and 
Boone — were now attracting more attention as 
people began to believe that the Indians could, 
after all, be made to keep their treaty pledges. 
As the Revolutionary fires raged in North 
Carolina, many turned their eyes to the fresh 
green lands beyond the mountains of which the 
" Long Hunters " and Boone had told. Were 
those dreams true ? Was there a pleasant 
land beyond dark Powell's Valley and darker 



88 Pilots of the Republic 

Cumberland Gap where the British would cease 
from troubling, and honest men, as well as crimi- 
nals and debtors, would be at rest ? The hope in 
one man's breast became a conviction, and the 
con\dction a firm purpose. Judge Henderson 
resolved to form a Transylvania Company, secure 
a large tract of land, and lead a colony into the 
sweet meadows of Ken-ta-kee. 

It is not known when or how Judge Hen- 
derson learned that the Cherokees would sell 
a portion of their Western hunting grounds. 
It may have been only a borderland rumor ; 
perhaps it came directly from the wigwams of 
the Indians at the mouth of a " Long Hunter," 
possibly a Boone or a Harrod. Somehow it did 
come, and Henderson resolved immediately to 
make a stupendous purchase and follow it up 
with a remarkable emigration. It will be proper 
to add at once that there is as little probability 
that the Cherokees had a legal right to sell as 
that Henderson had to buy ; but neither party 
stood on technicalities. Virginia's sweeping 
claims, made good by daring politics at the 



Pilots of the Republic 89 

treaty of Fort Stanwix, covered all the territory 
between the Ohio and the Tennessee. A Vir- 
ginian law forbade the private purchase of land 
from the Indians, though Virginia herself had 
acquired it by flagrantly evading the plain mean- 
ing of the King's proclamation of 1763 in mak- 
ing such a purchase from the Six Nations. And 
the claim of the Six Nations to possession of 
the Old Southwest was less substantial than 
that of the Cherokees who still hunted there. 

Passing, then, these technicalities as lightly 
as Virginia and Henderson did (a common fail- 
ing in the rough old days when this region was 
but a moaning forest), let us look quickly to 
the West. Henderson's plan was admirably 
laid. He at once took into his service the cool 
and trusty Daniel Boone. The latter was posted 
off to that most distant of borderland commu- 
nities, the Watauga Settlement, to arrange a 
meeting between the officers of the Transyl- 
vania Company and the chiefs of the Cherokees. 
And here, at the famed Sycamore Shoals on 
this Watauga tributary of the Tennessee, on 



90 Pilots of the Rejmblic 

the 17th of March, 1775, Richard Henderson 
signed the treaty of Fort Watauga. His busi- 
ness associates were Judge John Wilhams, 
Leonard Henley Bullock, James Hogg, Na- 
thaniel Thomas, David Hart, John Luttrell, 
and William Johnstone. But even the well- 
informed Boone could not make all things move 
smoothly, and there were delays ere the vast 
tract of twenty milhon acres lying south of 
the Kentucky River was satisfactorily secured. 
The Cherokee chieftain, Oconostota, opposed the 
treaty, and the stipulation named, ten thousand 
pounds sterling in goods ; he made, it is said, 
one of the " most eloquent orations that ever 
fell from red man's lips," against Boone and 
Henderson. At the close the quiet promoter, 
who " could be silent in EngUsh and two 
Indian languages," met the Indian orator apart 
and alone. No one ever knew what passed 
between them, but the treaty of Fort Watauga 
was duly signed. All was ready now for the 
advance movement, and Henderson immediately 
employed Daniel Boone to move forward to 



Pilots of the Republic 91 

mark the path to the Kentucky River, where 
the settlement was to be made. Fehx Walker 
was one of the band of woodsmen assembled 
by Boone to assist in this task of marking out 
for white men the Indian path through Cum- 
berland Gap. " Colonel Boone . . . was to be 
our pilot," Walker records, "through the wil- 
derness, to the promised land." 

Kentucky was a promised land ; it was prom- 
ised by the Cherokees, and none knew better 
than the savage Shawnees that Cherokee prom- 
ises were worth no more than their own. In 
1773 and 1774 numbers of the half-civilized 
pioneers had been pressing into Kentucky, and 
in the latter year cabins had been raised in 
many quarters. Whether or not there was any 
sign of genuine permanency in these beginnings, 
Dunmore's War, which broke out in 1774, put 
everything at hazard ; the Kentucky movement 
was seemingly destroyed for the time being. 
For this reason it is that the Henderson pur- 
chase at Fort Watauga in March, 1775, was of 
as precious moment and providential timeliness 



92 Pilots of the Republic 

as perhaps any other single private enterprise in 
our early history. As will be seen, the Ohio 
Company played a most important role in the 
history of the West in 1787, by making possible 
the famous Ordinance ; but the filling of Ken- 
tucky in 1775 was more important at that hour 
than any other social movement at any other 
hour in Western history. 

For Henderson " meant business " ; this was 
not a get-rich-quick scheme that he was foisting 
upon others. He came to Watauga in the 
expectation of proceeding onward to the far- 
lying land he would buy — a man willing to 
make great personal as well as financial risk in 
a venture more chimerical in its day than the 
incorporation of an airship freight line would 
be to-day. And by the twentieth of March, 
Henderson was ready to push westward, along 
that winding line of wounded trees, up hill and 
down valley, to the Gap and beyond into the 
wilderness which lay between the Cumber- 
land Mountains and the meadow lands of 
Kentucky. 



Pilots of the Republic 93 

Leaving Fort Watauga March 20, the party, 
chief of whicli were Henderson, Hart, and 
Luttrell, reached Captain Joseph Martin's sta- 
tion in Powell's Valley on the thirtieth. Of the 
experiences of these men, recounted so interest- 
ingly in Henderson's little yellow diary, nothing 
is so significant as the parties of pioneers which 
they soon began to meet retreating from Ken- 
tucky. The first of these hurrying bands of 
fugitives was encountered as early as April 7, 
and between that date and April 19 at least 
seventy-six fugitives from the " dark and bloody 
ground " met and passed Henderson's little 
colony of forty. Lewis's victory of the Summer 
before had embittered the savages beyond all 
words ; and now, as the Spring of 1775 dawned 
in the lonely mountain valleys, these first adven- 
turers into Kentucky were hurrying eastward. 
And this dread of Indian hostility was not a 
chimera ; even as Boone's party was hacking its 
route to the Kentucky River, it was ambushed 
in camp by an Indian horde, which assailed it 
when night was darkest, just before dawn ; one 



94 Pilots of the Bepublic 

man was killed and two were wounded, one of 
them fatally. 

Now it was that Boone sent Henderson those 
thrilling words which can be understood only 
when we realize that the Indian marauders were 
driving out of Kentucky the entire van which 
came there and began settling in 1774. " My 
advice to you, Sir," wrote Boone from that 
bloody battleground on the trail, " is to come or 
send as soon as possible. Your company is de- 
sired greatly, for the people are very uneasy, but 
are willing to stay and venture their lives with 
you, and now is the time to frustrate the inten- 
tions of the Indians, and keep the country whilst 
we are in it. If we give way to them now, it 
wiU ever be the case." 

There is, unfortunately, no portrait of Richard 
Henderson in existence ; if one picture by some 
magic art could be secured, those who are 
proudest of his memory could surely prefer no 
scene to this : a man a little above average 
height, broad of shoulders but not fleshy, clad in 
the rough garb of the typical pioneer, standing 



Pilots' of the Republic 95 

in Boone's trail on a ragged spur of the gTay- 
grained Cumberlands, pleading with a pale-faced, 
disheartened Kentucky pioneer, to turn about, 
join his company, and return to the Kentucky 
River. For this was the mission of his life — to 
give heart to that precious movement into Ken- 
tucky at this critical first hour of her history. A 
beginning had been made, but it was on the 
point of being swept from its feet. The Tran- 
sylvania Company, led with courage and confi- 
dence by Boone and Henderson, ignored the 
fears of fugitives and triumphed splendidly in 
the face of every known and many unknown 
fears. 

At noon of Saturday, April 8, Henderson and 
his followers were toiling up the ascent into Cum- 
berland Gap. On this day a returning party as 
large as Henderson's was encountered. " Met 
about 40 persons returning from the Cantuckey," 
WTote Henderson in his diary. " On Acct. of 
the Late Murder by the Indians, could prevail 
one [on] one only to return. IMemo. Several 
Virginians who were with us returned." On the 



96 Pilots of the Republic 

twelfth another company of fugitives was met 
on Richmond Creek ; William Calk, one of 
Henderson's party, jotted this down in his jour- 
nal : " There we met another Company going 
back [to Virginia] ; they tell such News Abram 
and Drake is afraid to go aney further." This 
" Abram " was Abraham Hanks, uncle of Nancy 
Hanks, the mother of Abraham Lincoln. But 
pushing bravely on, Henderson and his daring 
associates reached the site of the new Boones- 
borough (Fort Boone, Henderson called it) on 
the twentieth of April. 

From this it is well to date the founding 
of a genuine settlement in Kentucky, one day 
after the rattle of that running fire of muskets 
at Lexington and Concord which rang around 
the world. In an indefinite sense, there were 
settlements in Kentucky before this ; but no 
promoter-friend of Kentucky ever coaxed back 
over the Cumberland Mountains any of the 
founders of Boonesborough ! True, Boonesbor- 
ough itself did not exist permanently ; but not 
because the land was deserted. Boonesborouofh 



Pilots of the Republic 97 

was not on the direct line from Cumberland 
Gap to the "Falls of the Ohio" (Louisville), 
and did not play the part in later Kentucky 
history that Harrodsburg and Crab Orchard did. 
It was, however, the first important fortified 
Kentucky station, and its builders, chief of whom 
was Richard Henderson, received their heroic 
inspiration from no persons or parties in existence 
in Kentucky when they came thither. Hender- 
son's determination to hold the ground gained 
is seen in the following letter written in July, 
1775, to Captain Martin, in Powell's Valley, 
who had just given the Indians a bloody check : 
"... Your spirited conduct gives me great 
pleasure. Keep your men in heart If possible ; 
now is your time, the Indians must not drive 
us." A touch of the loneliness of Judge Hender- 
son's situation is sensed in another letter to 
Martin : " I long much to hear from you," he 
writes from the banks of the far-away Kentucky, 
"pray write me at large, how the matter goes 
with you in the valey, as well as what passes in 
Virginia." 



98 Pilots of the Republic 

Little wonder he was anxious concerning Vir- 
ginia's attitude toward his purchase and the bold 
advance of his party of colonizers, from which 
several Virginians had deserted. There could be 
no doubt of Virginia's opinion of these North 
Carolinians who had taught that colony what 
could be done in the West by brave, determined 
men. Henderson's purchase was annulled, and 
Henderson and his compatriots were described 
as vagabond interlopers, in a governor's anath- 
ema. Before this was known, Henderson issued 
a regular call for a meeting of the colo- 
nists to take the initial steps of forming a State 
government. But all that Henderson planned 
is not to our purpose here. A rush of Virginians 
through the doorway in Cumberland Gap, which 
Boone and Henderson had opened, swept the 
inchoate state of Transylvania from record and 
almost from memory. The Transylvania Com- 
pany never survived the Virginia governor's 
proclamation, North Carolina joining Virginia in 
repudiating the private purchase. Actual set- 
tlers on Henderson's purchase, however, were 



Pilots of the Republic 99 

permitted to remain in title ; and, in return for 
the money expended by Henderson and his asso- 
ciates, Virginia granted his company two hundred 
thousand acres of land in the vicinity of Hender- 
son, Kentucky ; and North Carolina granted an 
equal amount in Carter's Valley near the Cum- 
berland Mountains. In each case the actual 
acreage was about double that mentioned in 
the grant. 

But this appropriation of nearly a million acres 
to the Henderson Company cannot be viewed at 
this day as other than a payment for great value 
received. From any standpoint Richard Hender- 
son's brave advance into Kentucky, in April, 
1775, must be considered one of the most heroic 
displays of that typical American spirit of com- 
prehensive aggrandizement of which so much is 
heard to-day. Its great value may be guessed 
from the moral effect of the founding of Fort 
Boone at the critical hour when the Revolution- 
ary flames, so long burning in secret, burst forth 
to enlighten the world. It meant much to the 
East that Henderson and Boone should prove 
LOfC. 



100 Pilots of the Republic 

that a settlement on the lower Ohio Basin could 
be made and maintained ; it meant everything 
to the infant West that Kentucky should so soon 
begin to fill with men, women, and children. 
The debt of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to Ken- 
tucky can never be paid and probably never will 
be appropriately recognized. The lands north of 
the Ohio were freed from savage dominion largely 
by the raiding Kentuckians. It is certain that 
the most spectacular campaign in Western history, 
Clark's conquest of Illinois, would never have 
taken place in 1778 if Henderson and Boone had 
not placed the possibility of successful Kentucky 
immigration beyond a reasonable doubt in 1775. 
Judge Henderson returned to North Carolina 
upon the failure of the Transylvania Company, 
no doubt depressed and disappointed. The later 
allotment of land to the Transylvania Company 
by Virginia and North Carolina in part annulled 
the severe early defamatory charges of the Vir- 
ginia governor. He lived to a peaceful old age, 
and lies buried near his old colonial mansion 
near Williamstown, North Carolina. 



Pilots of the Republic 101 

Boonesborough is well remembered as Boone's 
Fort ; but it is unjust to forget that Boone was 
acting in the employ of Richard Henderson, the 
founder of Transylvania. 



CHAPTER IV 

A Movement among the Colonies to seize the Unoccupied 
Land Northwest of the Ohio. — Putnam''s Hardy Training 
in Boyhood. — His Training in the Old French War. — 
His Achievements in the Revolutionary War. — He and 
Many Soldiers petition Congress for Western Land^ as 
promised at the Beginning of the War. — The Ohio 
Company of Associates., by its Agent, Mr. Cutler, per- 
suades Congress to pass the Ordinance of 1787. — March 
of the Founders of Ohio from Ipswich, Mass., to the 
Site of West Nexoton, Pa. — Putnam prepares to descend 
the Youghiogheny, Monongahela, and Ohio to Fort 
Harmar. — Fears of the Travellers that the Indians 
driven from KentucTiy xcoidd attack them. — The Party 
found Marietta at the Moidh of the MxisMngum. — In- 
aiiguraticni of the Governor of the Territory. — Con- 
trast beticeen Conditions, North of the Ohio and South 
of it. — Other Settlements on the Ohio in the Eigh- 
teenth Century. — Pidnavi's Beautiful Character. — 
Washington s Opinion of him. 



CHAPTER IV 



RUFUS PUTNAM: THE FATHER OF OHIO 

VER the be- 
ginning of great 
movements, 
whether social or 
pohtical, there 
often hangs a 
cloud of obscu- 
rity. No event 
of equal impor- 
tance in our his- 
tory is more clear 
than the found- 
ing and first set- 
tlement of the territory northwest of the Ohio 
River, from which the five imperial common- 
wealths of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and 
Wisconsin sprang. It occurred at that crucial 




106 Pilots of the Republic 

moment when Washington was calling upon 
Virginia, and all the colonies, to seize the West 
and the hope it offered, when the West was 
another name for opportunity to the spent colo- 
nies at the close of the Revolutionary struggle. 

The hero of the movement, General Rufus 
Putnam, was one of those plain, sturdy, noble 
men whom it is a delight to honor. He was born 
at Sutton, Massachusetts, April 9, 1738, and was 
thus six years younger than Washington, who 
always honored him. With little education, 
save that gained from a few books bought with 
pennies earned by blacking boots and running 
errands for guests at his illiterate stepfather's 
inn, he became a self-made man of the best 
type, — the man who seizes every advantage 
from book and friend to reach a high plane 
and scan a wider horizon. The Old French War 
was the training school for the Revolutionary 
conflict ; and here, with Gates and Mercer and 
Washington and St. Clair and Wayne and 
Gladwin and Gibson, Rufus Putnam learned 
to love his country as only those can who have 




lluFus Putnam 
Leader of the Founders of Marietta, Ohio 



Pilots of the Republic 107 

been willing to risk and wreck their all in her 
behalf. 

Then came the Revolution. In the first act 
of the glorious yet pitiful drama Rufus Putnam 
stands out conspicuously ; for " we take no leaf 
ffom the pure chaplet of Washington's fame," 
affirmed Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, " when 
we say that the success of the first great military 
operation of the Revolution was due to Rufus 
Putnam." The story is of intrinsic interest. 
On a winter's evening in 1776, Rufus Putnam 
was invited to dine at the headquarters of the 
Commander-in-chief in the camp before Boston. 
After the dinner party had broken up, Washing- 
ton detained him with questions concerning the 
proper policy to be pursued with reference to 
the future plan of campaign. As is well known, 
Washington favored an entrenchment on Dor- 
chester Heights which would bring on a second 
Bunker Hill with a fair chance of victory, rather 
than the alternative of marching upon the city 
across the ice-bound waters. But the frozen 
state of the ground was a serious handicap in 



108 Pilots of the Republic 

any entrenchment plan at that moment. Put- 
nam was asked in short how the equivalent of 
entrenchments could be erected ; the solving of 
the question meant the dehverance of Massa- 
chusetts from the burden of British occupa- 
tion. This son of the State was equal to the 
moment, and his own simple account of the 
means adopted is exceptionally interesting : 

"I left headquarters in company with another gentle- 
man, and on our way came by General Heath's. I had 
no thoughts of calling until I came against his door, and 
then I said, ' Let us call on General Heath,"" to which he 
agreed. I had no other motive but to pay my respects 
to the genei'al. While there, I cast my eye on a book 
which lay on the table, lettered on the back ' Muller's 
Field Engineer.' I immediately requested the general 
to lend it to me. He denied me. I repeated my re- 
quest. He again refused, and told me he never lent his 
books. I then told him that he must recollect that he 
was one who, at Roxbury, in a measure compelled me 
to undertake a business which, at the time, I confessed 
I never had read a word about, and that he must let 
me have the book. After some more excuses on his 
part and close pressing on mine I obtained the loan 
of it." 



Pilots of the Republic 109 

" In looking at the table of contents/' writes Senator 
Hoar, " his eye was caught by the word ' chandelier,** a 
new word to him. He read carefully the description and 
soon had his plan ready. The chandeliers were made of 
stout timbers, ten feet long, into which were framed posts, 
five feet high and five feet apart, placed on the ground in 
parallel lines and the open spaces filled in with bundles of 
fascines, strongly picketed together, thus forming a mov- 
able parapet of wood instead of earth, as heretofore done. 
The men were immediately set to work in the adjacent 
apple orchard and woodlands, cutting and bundling up 
the fascines and carrying them with the chandeliers on to 
the ground selected for the work. They were put in their 
place in a single night. 

"When the sun went down on Boston on the 4th of 
March, Washington was at Cambridge, and Dorchester 
Heights were as nature or the husbandman had left them 
in the autumn. When Sir William Howe rubbed his eyes 
on the morning of the 5th, he saw through the heavy 
mists, the entrenchments, on which, he said, the rebels 
had done more work in a night than his whole army 
would have done in a month. He wrote to Lord Dart- 
mouth that it must have been the employment of at least 
twelve thousand men. His own effective force, including 
seamen, was but about eleven thousand. Washington 
had but fourteen thousand fit for duty. ' Some of our 
officers,' said the ' Annual Register,' — I suppose Edmund 



110 Pilots of the Republic 

Burke was the wiiter, — ' acknowledged that the expe- 
dition with which these works were thrown up, with their 
sudden and unexpected appearance, recalled to their 
minds the wonderful stories of enchantment and in- 
visible agency which are so frequent in the Eastern 
Romances."* Howe was a man of spirit. He took the 
prompt resolution to attempt to dislodge the Americans 
the next night before their works were made impregnable. 
Earl Percy, who had learned something of Yankee quality 
at Bunker Hill and Lexington, was to command the 
assault. But the Power that dispersed the Armada, 
baffled all the plans of the British general. There came 
* a dreadful storm at night,' which made it impossible to 
cross the bay until the American works were perfected. 
The Americans, under Israel Putnam, marched into Bos- 
ton, drums beating and colors flying. The veteran Brit- 
ish army, aided by a strong naval force, soldier and sailor, 
Englishman and Tory, sick and well, bag and baggage, 
got out of Boston before the strategy of Washington, the 
engineering of Putnam, and the courage of the despised 
and untried yeomen, from whose leaders they withheld 
the usual titles of military respect. ' It resembled,'' said 
Burke, ' more the emigration of a nation than the break- 
ing up of a camp.' " 

His later solid achievements during the war 
made him, in Washington's estimation, the best 



Pilots of the Republic 111 

engineer in the army, whether French or Amer- 
ican, and " to be a great engineer with only such 
advantages of education as Rufus Putnam en- 
joyed, is to be a man of consummate genius." 
A sober, brave man of genius was required to 
lead to a successful issue the great work to 
which Rufus Putnam was now providentially 
called. 

The vast territory between the Alleghanies 
and the Mississippi came into the possession of 
the United States at the close of the Revolution. 
Then it was made possible for Congress to gi-ant 
the bounty-lands promised to soldiers at the be- 
ginning of the war, and likewise to redeem its 
worthless script in Western lands. This a grate- 
ful government was willing to do, but the ques- 
tion was vast and difficult. If occupied, the 
territory must be governed. Few more serious 
problems faced the young Republic. 

The question was practically solved by two 
men, Rufus Putnam and that noble clergyman, 
Manasseh Cutler, pastor of the Congi*egational 
church at Ipswich, Massachusetts. Through 



112 Pilots of the Republic 

Putnam, a large body of officers and men had 
petitioned Congress urgently for Western land : 
" Ten years ago you promised bounties in lands," 
was Putnam's appeal now to Congress through 
General Washington ; " we have faithfully per- 
formed our duty, as history will record. We 
come to you now and ask that, in redemption 
of your promise, you give us homes in that 
Western wilderness. We will hew down the 
forests, and therein erect temples to the living 
God, raise and educate our children to serve and 
love and honor the nation for which their fathers 
fought, cultivate farms, build towns and cities, 
and make that wilderness the pride and glory 
of the nation." The Ohio Company of Associ- 
ates was organized at the Bunch of Grapes Tav- 
ern, in Boston, March 1, 1786, by the election 
of Rufus Putnam, chairman, and Winthrop Sar- 
gent, secretary. As the agent of this organiza- 
tion, Dr. Cutler hastened to New York, while the 
famous Ordinance of 1787 was pending. This 
instrument had been before Congi-ess for three 
years, but was passed within twelve days after 



Pilots of the Republic 113 

this hero-preacher and skilled diplomat came to 
New York. The Ordinance organized, from 
lands ceded to the general government by the 
several States, the magnificent tract known as 
the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio. 
The delay had been caused by the hazard of 
erecting a great Territory, to be protected at 
heavy expense, without having it occupied by 
a considerable number of worthy citizens. The 
Ohio Company of Associates had offered to take 
a million and a half acres. This was unsatisfac- 
tory to the delegates in Congress. It was a 
mere clearing in all that vast tract stretching 
from the Alleghany to the Wisconsin. Dr. 
Cutler hastened to New York to reconcile the 
parties interested. 

The situation was prophetically unique. The 
Northwest Territory could not be organized 
safely without the very band of colonizers which 
Cutler represented and of which Putnam was 
the leader. On the other hand, the Ohio Com- 
pany could not secure Western land without 
being assured that it was to be an integral part 



114 Pilots of the Republic 

of the country for which they had fought. Put- 
nam's appeal read : " All we ask is that it shall 
be consecrated to us and our children forever, 
with the blessing of that Declaration which, 
proclaimed to the world and sustained by our 
arms, established as self-evident that all men 
are created equal ; that they are endowed by 
their Creator with certain inalienable rights ; 
that among these are life, liberty, and the pur- 
suit of happiness, and that to secure these ends, 
governments are instituted among men, deriving 
their just power from the consent of the gov- 
erned." Thus the famed Ordinance and the 
Ohio Company's purchase went hand in hand ; 
each was impossible without the other. In order 
to realize the hope of his clients on the one hand, 
and satisfy the demands of the delegates in 
Congress on the other. Dr. Cutler added to 
the grant of the Ohio Company an additional 
one of three and a half million acres for a Scioto 
Company. Thus, by a stupendous speculation 
(so unhappy in its result, though compromising 
in no way the Ohio Company or its agents), 




Rev. Manasseh Cutlkr 
Ohio Pioneer 



Pilots of the Republic 115 

and by shrewdly, though without dissimulation, 
making known his determination to buy land 
privately from one of the individual States if 
Congress would not now come to terms, Dr. 
Cutler won a signal victory. The Ordinance 
of 1787 was passed, corrected to the very letter 
of his own amendments, and the United States 
entered into the largest private contract it had 
ever made. 

With the passing of the Ordinance and the 
signing of the indented agreement for the Ohio 
Company by Cutler and Sargent on the 27th 
of October of that most memorable year in 
our documentary annals, a new era of Western 
history dawned. Up to that moment, there had 
been only illegal settlements between the Ohio 
River and the Great Lakes — excepting the 
grants of land made to David Zeisberger's Mo- 
ravians on the Tuscarawas. On numerous oc- 
casions troops had been sent from Pittsburg 
(Fort Pitt) to drive away from the northern 
side of the Ohio settlers who had squatted on 
the Seven Ranges, which Congress had caused 



116 Pilots of the Republic 

to be surveyed westward from the Pennsylvania 
line. It being difficult to reach these squatters 
from Pittsburg, Fort Harmar was erected at the 
mouth of the Muskingum, in 1785, where troops 
were kept to drive off intruders, protect the sur- 
veyors, and keep the Indians in awe. The Ohio 
Company's purchase extended from the seventh 
through the seventeenth range, running north- 
ward far enough to include the necessary amount 
of territory. It was natural, then, that the cap- 
ital of the new colony should be located at the 
mouth of the Muskingum, under the guns of 
the fort. 

The New Englanders who formed the Ohio 
Company were not less determined in their 
venture than were the North Carolinians who 
formed the Transylvania Company thirteen 
years before ; and, though the founders of Mari- 
etta, Ohio, ran no such risk (it has been said) as 
did the founders of Boonesborough, Kentucky, 
we of to-day can have no just appreciation of the 
toil and the wearing years which these founders 
of the Old Northwest now faced. Yet danger 



Pilots of the Republic 117 

and fear were no novelty to them. How fitting 
it was that these men, who first entered the por- 
tals of the Northwest, bearing in their hands the 
precious Ordinance and guided by the very star 
of empire, should have been in part the heroes 
of the two wars which saved this land from its 
enemies. One cannot look unmoved upon that 
body of travellers who met at daybreak, Decem- 
ber 6, 1787, before Dr. Cutler's home at Ipswich, 
to receive his blessing before starting. Theirs 
was no idle ambition. No Moravian, no Jesuit 
with beads and rosary, ever faced the Western 
wilderness with a fairer purpose. In Kentucky, 
the Virginians had gained, and were holding with 
powerful grasp, the fair lands of Ken-ta-kee ; 
elsewhere the Black Forest loomed dark and 
foreboding. Could the New Englanders do 
equally well? 

Their earnestness was a prophecy of their 
great success. In December the first party of 
carpenters and boat-builders, under JVIajor Hat- 
field White, started on the westward journey, 
and in January 1788 the remainder of the brave 



118 Pilots of the Republic 

vanguard, under Colonel Ebenezer Sproat and 
General Rufus Putnam, followed. These were 
the forty-eight " Founders of Ohio." The rigors 
of a northern winter made the long journey over 
Forbes's, or the Pennsylvania Road, a most ex- 
haustive experience. This road through Lancas- 
ter, Carlisle, Shippensburg, and Bedford was 
from this time forward a connecting link be- 
tween New England and Ohio. It was a rough 
gorge of a road ploughed deep by the heavy 
wheels of many an army wagon. Near Bed- 
ford, Pennsylvania, the road forked ; the north- 
ern fork ran on to Pittsburg ; the southern, 
struck off south westwardly to the Youghiogheny 
River and the lower Ohio. This branch the 
New England caravan followed to Sumrill's 
Ferry on the Youghiogheny, the present West 
Newton, Pennsylvania. Here Putnam planned 
to build a rude flotilla and descend the Youghio- 
gheny, Monongahela, and Ohio to Fort Harmar. 
The severe winter prevented immediate building 
of this fleet, but by April all was in readiness. 
The main boat was a covered galley, forty-five 



Pilots of the Bepuhlic 119 

feet long, which was most appropriately named 
the " Adventure Galley." The heavy baggage 
was carried on a flat boat and a large canoe. 

Of the men who formed Putnam's company 
what more can be said — or what less — than 
what Senator Hoar has left in his eloquent cen- 
tennial oration at Marietta in 1888 ? 

"The stately figures of illustrious warriors and states- 
men, the forms of sweet and comely matrons, living and 
real as if you had seen them yesterday, rise before you 
now, Varnum, than whom a courtlier figure never en- 
tered the presence of a queen, — soldier, statesman, scholar, 
orator, — whom Thomas Paine, no mean judge, who had 
heard the greatest English orators in the greatest days 
of English eloquence, declared the most eloquent man he 
had ever heard speak ; Whipple, gallant seaman as ever 
trod a deck, — a man whom Farragut or Nelson would 
have loved as a brother, first of the glorious procession 
of American naval heroes, first to fire an American gun 
at the flag of England on the sea, first to unfurl the flag 
of his own country on the Thames, first pioneer of the 
river commerce of the Ohio to the Gulf; Meigs, hero of 
Sagg Harbor, of the march to Quebec, of the storming 
of Stony Point, the Christian gentleman and soldier, 
whom the Cherokees named the White Path, in token 



120 Pilots of the Republic 

of the unfailing kindness and inflexible faith which had 
conveyed to their darkened minds some not inadequate 
conception of the spirit of Him who is the Way, the 
Truth, and the Life ; Parsons, soldier, scholar, judge, one 
of the strongest arms on which Washington leaned, who 
first suggested the Continental Congress, from the story 
of whose life could almost be written the history of the 
Northern War ; the chivalric and ingenious Devol, said by 
his biographer to be 'the most perfect figure of a man 
to be seen amongst a thousand ' ; the noble presence of 
a Sproat ; the sons of Israel Putnam and Manasseh Cut- 
ler ; Fearing, and Greene, and Goodale, and the Gilmans ; 
Tupper, leader in Church and State, the veteran of a hun- 
dred exploits, who seems, in the qualities of intellect and 
heart, like a twin brother of Rufus Putnam ; the brave 
and patriotic, but unfortunate St. Clair, first Governor of 
the Northwest, President of the Continental Congress ; — 
the mighty shades of these heroes and their companions 
pass before our eyes, beneath the primeval forest, as the 
shades of the Homeric heroes before Ulysses in the Land 
of Asphodel."" 

It did not argue that the New Englanders 
on the Ohio could hold their ground simply be- 
cause the Kentucky movement had been for over 
a decade such a marvellous success. Its very 



Pilots of the Republic 121 

success was the chief menace of the Kentucky 
problem. The eyes of five thousand Indians 
were fastened there, for from Kentucky had come 
army after army, driving the savages northward 
out of the valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, 
and ^liami Rivers, until now they hovered 
about the western extremity of Lake Erie. By 
a treaty signed at Fort Mcintosh in 1786, the 
Indians had sold to the United States practically 
all of eastern and southern Ohio. And so the 
settlement at the mouth of the Muskingum at 
this critical moment was in every sense a test 
settlement. There was a chance that the sav- 
ages would forget the Kentuckians who had 
driven them back to the Lakes and made pos- 
sible the Ohio Company settlement and turn 
upon the New Englanders themselves who now 
landed at the mouth of the Muskingum on the 
7th of April, 1788, and began their home-building 
on the opposite bank of the Muskingum from 
Fort Harmar. 

Here sprang up the rude pioneer settlement 
which was to be, for more than a year, the capital 



122 Pilots of the Republic 

of the great new Territory — forever the historic 
portal of the Old Northwest. These Revolu- 
tionary soldiers under Putnam combined the 
two names Marie Antoinette, and named their 
capital Marietta in memory of the faithfulness 
of Frenchmen and France to the patriot cause. 
Here arose the stately forest-castle, the Cam- 
pus Martins, and near it was built the office of 
the Ohio Company, where General Putnam car- 
ried on, in behalf of the Ohio Company, the 
important business of the settlement. In July, 
1788, Governor St. Clair arrived, and with im- 
posing ceremony the great Territory was for- 
mally established and its governor inaugurated. 

Putnam's brave dream had come true. The 
best blood and brain of New England were now 
on the Ohio to shape forever the Old Northwest 
and the gi'eat States to be made fi'om it. The 
soldiers were receiving the promised bounties, 
and an almost worthless half-a-million dollars 
had been redeemed in lands worth many mil- 
lions. The scheme of colonization, which was 
but a moment before a thing of words and 



Pilots of the Republic 123 

paper, became a living, moving influence of im- 
mense power. Another New England on the 
Ohio arose full-armed from the specifications of 
the great Ordinance and the daring confidence 
of Rufus Putnam and his colony. South of 
the Ohio, the miserable Virginia system of land- 
ownership by tomahawk-claim was in force from 
the Monongahela to the Tennessee ; north of 
the Ohio, the New England township system 
prevailed. South of the Ohio, slavery was 
permitted and encouraged ; to the northward, 
throughout the wide empire included within the 
Ordinance, slavery was forever excluded. Two 
more fundamental differences could not have 
existed. And to these might be added the 
encom'agement given by the Ordinance to re- 
ligion and education. The coming of the Ohio 
Company to Marietta meant many things to 
many men, but the one great fundamental fact 
is of most importance. The founding of Mari- 
etta by Rufus Putnam in reality made possible 
the Ordinance of 1787 — of which Daniel Web- 
ster said, " I doubt whetlier one single law of 



124 Pilots of the Republic 

any lawgiver, ancient or modern, has produced 
effects of more distinct, marked, and lasting 
character." 

The heroic movement which has justly given 
Rufus Putnam the title " Father of Ohio " has 
been one of the marvellous successes of the first 
century of our national expansion. Three other 
settlements were made on the Ohio in 1788 near 
Cincinnati by sons of New Jersey. Within ten 
years, Connecticut sent a brave squad of men 
through the wilderness of New York to found 
Cleveland ; Virginia sent of her brain and blood 
to found one of the most important settlements 
in Ohio in the fair Scioto valley. These four 
settlements, before 1800, in the Black Forest of 
Ohio were typically cosmopolitan and had a sig- 
nificant mission in forming, so far west as Lake 
Erie and so far south as the lower Ohio, the 
cosmopolitan American State par excellence. 

But of all these early prompters — Symmes, 
Cleaveland, Massie, and Putnam — the last is the 
most lovable, and the movement he led is the 
most significant and interesting. Our subject is 



Pilots of the Republic 125 

so large in all its leading features, that the per- 
sonality of Putnam can only be touched upon. 
As manager for the Ohio Company, a thousand 
affairs of both great and trifling moment were 
a part of his tiresome routine. Yet the heart of 
the colony's leader was warm to the lowliest ser- 
vant. Many a poor tired voyager descending 
the Ohio had cause to know that the founder 
of INIarietta was as good as a whole nation 
knew he was brave. In matters concerning the 
founding of the "Old Two-Horn," the first 
church in the Old Northwest, — and in the organ- 
izing of the little academy in the block-house 
of the fort, to which Marietta College proudly 
traces her founding, the private formative in- 
fluence of Putnam is seen to clear advantage. 
Noble in a great crisis, he was noble still in the 
lesser wearing duties of that pioneer colony of 
which he was the hope and mainstay. Now 
called upon by Washington to make the long 
journey, in the dark days of 1792 after St. 
Clair's terrible defeat, to represent the United 
States in a treaty with the Illinois Indians on 



126 Pilots of the Republic 

the Wabash ; again, with sweet earnestness 
setthng a difficulty arising between a tipphng 
clergyman and his church ; now, with absolute 
fairness and generosity, criticising his brave but 
high-strung governor for actions which he re- 
garded as too arbitrary, the character of Rufus 
Putnam appeals more and more as a remarkable 
example of that splendid simplicity which is the 
proof and crown of greatness. 

A yellow manuscript in Washington's hand- 
writing is preserved in the New York State 
Library, which contains his private opinion of 
the Revolutionary officers. It is such a paper 
as Washington would not have left for the pub- 
lic to read, as it expresses an inside view. Rela- 
tives of a number of these Revolutionary heroes 
would not read its simple sentences with pleas- 
ure, but the descendants of Rufus Putnam may 
remember it with pride : Putnam had not been 
accused of securing certificates from his soldiers 
by improper means ; he was not, like Wayne, 
" open to flattery — vain " ; the odor of a whis- 
key flask was not suggested by his name ; on 



Pilots of the Republic 127 

the contrary, " he possesses a strong mind and is 
a discreet man." Considering the nature and 
purpose of this high encomium, it is not less than 
a hearty " Well done " to a good and faithful 
servant. 



CHAPTER V 

The Grave of David Zeisberger, Moravian Missionary to 
the Indians. — The Great Length of his Service. — His 
Flight from Moravia to Saxony. — Arrival at Beth- 
lehem^ Pa. — He studies the Mohawk Language. — 
Visits the Land of the Iroquois and is captwed as a 
French Spy. — Imprisoned hy Governor Clinton and 
freed hy Parliament. — The Iroquois place in his 
Mission-house the A rchives of their Nation. — He con- 
verts Many Delawares in Western Pennsylvania. — His 
Work interrupted by Pontiacs Rebellion. — The Del- 
awares invite him to the Black Forest of Ohio. — He 
takes with him Two Whole Villages of Christian Indians. 
— Their Unfortunate Location betxceen Fort Pitt and 
Fort Detroit in the Revohdionary War. — They are 
removed by the British to Sandusky. — One Hundred 
of them, being permitted to return^ are murdered by the 
Americans. — The Remnant, after Many Hardships, 
rest for Six Years in Canada, and return to Ohio. — 
Zeisbergers Death. 



CHAPTER V 



DAVID ZEISBERGER: HERO OF "THE MEADOW 
OF LIGHT" 

N the centre of 
the old Black 
Forest of Amer- 
ica, near A^ew 
Philadelphia, 
Ohio, a half- 
forgotten Indian 
graveyard lies 
beside the dusty 
country road. 
You may count 
here several 
score of graves 

by the slight mounds of earth that were raised 

above them a century or so ago. 

At one extremity of this plot of ground an 

iron railing incloses another grave, marked by a 




132 Pilots of the Republic 

plain, marble slab, where rest the mortal remains 
of a hero, the latchets of whose shoes few men 
of his race have been worthy to unloose. And 
those of us who hold duty a sacred trust, and 
likeness unto the Nazarene the first and chiefest 
duty, will do well to make the acquaintance of 
this daring and faithful hero, whose very mem- 
ory throws over the darkest period of our history 
the light that never was on sea or land. 

The grave is that of David Zeisberger, the 
Moravian missionary to the Indians in New York, 
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Canada for 
fifty active years, who was buried at this spot 
at his dying request, that he might await the 
Resurrection among his faithful Indians. His 
record is perhaps unequalled in point of length 
of service, by the record of any missionary of 
any church or sect in any land at any time. 
Among stories of promotion and daring in early 
America, this one is most unique and most 
uplifting. 

On a July night in 1726 a man and his wife 
fled from their home in Austrian Moravia toward 



Pilots of the Republic 133 

the mountains on the border of Saxony for con- 
science' sake. They took with them nothing 
save their five-year-old boy, M^ho ran stumbhng 
between them, holding to their hands. The 
family of three remained in Saxony ten years. 
Then the parents emigrated to America, leaving 
the son of fifteen years in Saxony to continue 
his education. But within a year he took pas- 
sage for America and joined his parents in 
Georgia, just previous to their removal to Beth- 
lehem, Pennsylvania. 

The lad soon became interested in the study 
of the Delaware Indian language among the 
natives of that tribe living along the Susque- 
hanna, and at once showed great proficiency. 
Appreciating his talent, the fathers of the Mo- 
ravian Church determined to send the young 
man to Europe, that in the best universities he 
might secure the finest training. He went as 
far as New York. There, just as his ship was 
to sail, he pleaded with tears and on his knees 
to be allowed to return to the woods of Penn- 
sylvania and the school of the red men there. 



134 Pilots of the Republic 

The words of the wise were overcome by those 
of the youth, and an earnest soul, as brave as 
it was earnest, was saved to a life of unparalleled 
sacrifice and devotion. 

On returning to Bethlehem Zeisberger joined 
a class that was studying the Mohawk tongue, 
the language of that most powerful tribe of the 
Iroquois nation which practically controlled, by 
tomahawk and threat, all the territory between 
the colonies and the Mississippi. Soon the 
looked-for opportunity of visiting the Iroquois 
land came, and the young student was told off 
to accompany the heroic Frederick Christian 
Post. This was in the dark year 1744, only a 
few months previous to the outbreak of the Old 
French War. The lad was now in his twenty- 
third year. 

In February of the next year, after these two 
men entered the shadow of New York, the re- 
port was circulated in New York City that two 
spies had been captured among the Iroquois, 
who were guilty of attempting to win that na- 
tion over to the French. Such a charge at this 



Pilots of the Republic 135 

time was the most serious imaginable, for the 
contest for the friendship of the Iroquois be- 
tween the French on the St. Lawrence and the 
Enghsh on the Atlantic was now of great im- 
portance. Upon that friendship, and the sup- 
port it guaranteed, seemed to hang the destiny 
of the continent. The report created endless 
consternation, and the spies were hurried on to 
Governor Clinton, who demanded that the 
younger be brought before him instantly. 

" Why do you go among the Indians ? " asked 
Clinton, savagely. It was David Zeisberger to 
whom he spoke, a youth not daunted by arro- 
gance and bluster. 

*' To learn their language," he replied, calmly. 

"And what use will you make of their 
language ? " 

" We hope," replied the lad, " to get the 
liberty to preach among the Indians the Gospel 
of our crucified Saviour, and to declare to them 
what we have personally experienced of His 
grace in our hearts." 

The Governor was taken aback. This was a 



136 Pilots of the Republic 

strange answer to have come from a spy's lips. 
Yet he drove on rough-shod, taking it for 
granted that the lad w^as lying, and that there 
was an ulterior motive for the dangerous jour- 
ney at such a time. Remembering the fort the 
English had built near the present site of Rome, 
New York, and by which they hoped to com- 
mand the JNIohawk Valley and the portage 
path to Wood Creek and Lake Oneida, he 
continued : 

" You observed how many cannon were in Fort 
William, and how many soldiers and Indians in 
the castle ? " 

" I was not so much as in the fort, nor did 1 
count the soldiers or Indians." 

Balked and angry, as well as nonplussed, 
Governor Clinton insisted : 

" Our laws require that all travellers in this 
government of New York shall swear allegiance 
to the King of England and have a license from 
the Governor." 

Governor Clinton's name would certainly not 
adorn a license for these men. AYhether or not 



Pilots of the Republic 137 

the youth saw the trap, he was as frank as his 
interrogator : 

" I never before heard of such a law in 
any country or kingdom in the world," replied 
Zeisberger. 

" Will you not take the oath ? " roared Gov- 
ernor Clinton, amazed. 

" I will not," said the prisoner, and he was 
straightway cast into a prison, where he and 
his companion lay for six weeks, until freed by 
an ordinance passed by Parhament exempting 
the missionaries of the Moravian Church from 
taking oath to the British crown. 

Back into the Iroquois land journeyed the 
liberated prisoner, and for ten doubtful years, 
until 1755, Zeisberger was engaged in learning 
the languages of the various tribes of the Six 
Nations, and in active missionary service. His 
success was very great. Perhaps in all the his- 
tory of these famous Indians there was no other 
man, with the exception of Sir William Johnson, 
whom they trusted as much as they trusted 
David Zeisberger. Cheated on the one hand 



138 Pilots of the Republic 

by the Dutch of New York, and robbed on the 
other by agents of the French and the EngHsh, 
the Iroquois became suspicious of all men ; and 
it is vastly more than a friendly compliment to 
record that in his mission-house at Onondaga 
they placed the entire archives of their nation, 
comprising the most valuable collection of treat- 
ies and letters from colonial governors ever made 
by an Indian nation on this continent. But war 
now drove the missionary away, as throughout 
his life war was ever to dash his fondest dreams 
and ever to drive him back. 

At the close of the Old French War, the mis- 
sionaries of the Moravian Church were out again 
upon the Indian trails that led to the North and 
West. The first to start was Zeisberger, now 
in the prime of life, forty- two years old. But 
he did not turn northward. A call that he 
could not ignore had come to him from the 
friends of his boyhood days, the Delawares, who 
lived now in Western Pennsylvania. With a 
single companion he pushed outward to them. 
Taking up his residence in what is now Bradford 



Pilots of the Republic 139 

County, Pennsylvania, he soon began to repeat 
the successes he had achieved in the Iroquois 
land, many being converted, and the whole 
nation learning to love and trust the earnest 
preacher. Then came Pontiac's terrible rebel- 
lion. Compelled to hurry back to the settle- 
ments again, Zeisberger awaited the end of 
that bloody storm, which swept away every 
fort in the West save only Fort Pitt and 
Fort Detroit. 

At last the way was again open, and Zeis- 
berger soon faced the wilderness. The Church 
fathers now came to the conclusion that it was 
best to extend missionary labor farther than ever 
before. The entire West had been saved to 
England, and the future was bright. It was 
Zeisberger to whom they looked, and not for 
a moment did the veteran flinch. 

" Whither is the white man going ? " asked an 
old Seneca chieftain of Zeisberger. 

" To the Alleghany River," was the reply. 

** Why does the paleface travel such un- 
known roads ? This is no road for white 



140 Pilots of the Republic 

people, and no white man has come this trail 
before." 

" Seneca," said the pale man, " the business I 
am on is different from that of other white men, 
and the roads I travel are different too. I am 
come to bring the Indian great and good words." 

The work now begun in Potter County, and 
later extended to Lawrence County, on the Beaver 
River, in the province of Pennsylvania, was not 
less successful than Zeisberger's work in New 
York. " You are right," said the bravest Indian 
of the nation to his Indian chieftain ; "I have 
joined the Moravians. Where they go I will 
go ; where they lodge I will lodge ; their God 
shall be my God." His faith was soon tested, 
as was that of all Zeisberger's converts. 

For there was yet a farther West. Beyond 
the Beaver, the Delaware nation had spread 
throughout the Black Forest that covered what 
is now Ohio to the dots of prairie land on 
the edge of what is Indiana. Somewhere here 
the prairie fires had ceased their devastation. 
Between the Wabash and the crest o^ the 



Pilots of the Republic 141 

AUeghanies lay the heaviest forest of the old 
New World. Of its eastern half the Delawares 
were now masters, with their capital at Gosch- 
goschunk on the Muskingum, the present Co- 
shocton, Ohio. The fame of Zeisberger had 
come even here, and the grand council of the 
Delawares sent him a call to bring his great and 
good words into the Black Forest. It was an 
irresistible appeal. Yet the Moravian Church 
could not allow Zeisberger to leave the congre- 
gations in Pennsylvania, for no one could take 
his place. The brave man gave his answer 
quickly : "I will take them with me." 

He kept his word, and in the Spring of 1772 
the heroic man could have been seen floating 
down the Beaver and Ohio rivers with two 
whole villages of Christian Indians, seeking a 
new home in the Black Forest on the Upper 
Maskingum. Here they founded three settle- 
ments in all, Schonbrunn (Beautiful Spring), 
Lichtenau (Meadow of Light), Gnadenhiitten 
(Tents of Grace), where the fabled wanderer is 
made by the poet to extend his search for 



142 Pilots of the Republic 

Evangeline. Here the Moravian missionaries, 
Zeisberger and his noble assistant, Heeke wel- 
der, spent five marvellously successful years, 
in what is known as the first settlements of 
whites in the present State of Ohio, excepting 
such French as had lived in the Lake region. 
The settlements were governed by a complete 
set of published laws, and in many respects 
the experiment was an ideality fully achieved. 
The good influence of the orderly and devout 
colony spread throughout the Central West at 
a time when every influence was bad and grow- 
ing rapidly worse. For five or six years Zeis- 
berger here saw the richest fruit of his life ; 
here also he was doomed to see what was un- 
doubtedly the most disgraceful and dastardly 
crime ever committed in the name of freedom 
on tills continent. 

The Revolutionary War now broke out, as 
if to despoil wantonly this aged hero's last and 
happiest triumph. The Moravians determined 
upon the impossible role of neutrality, with 
their settlements just beside the hard, wide 




John Heckewkldeu 
Missionar-i/ to the Itul'unis 



Pilots of the Republic 143 

war-path which ran between Fort Pitt and 
Fort Detroit ; these were the strongholds, re- 
spectively, of the Americans and the British, 
who were quarrelling bitterly for the allegiance 
of the savages in the Black Forest between 
them. The policy was wholly disastrous. For 
some time the Christian Indians, because the 
influence of the past few years had been so 
uplifting, escaped unharmed. But as the con- 
flict grew, bitter suspicion arose among both 
the Americans in Western Pennsylvania and 
the British at Sandusky and Detroit. 

The British first took action. In 1781 three 
hundred Indians under a British officer appeared 
and ordered the inhabitants of the three villages 
to leave the valley they loved and go to San- 
dusky, where a stricter watch might be kept 
over them. Like sheep they were driven north- 
ward, the aged Zeisberger toiling at the head 
of the broken-hearted company. As Winter 
came down from the north, there being very 
little food, a company of one hundred Christian 
Indians obtained permission to return to their 



144 Pilots of the Repuhlic 

former homes to harvest corn which had been 
left standing in the fields. It was an unfortunate 
moment for the return, and the borderers on the 
ravaged Pennsylvania frontier looked upon the 
movement with suspicion. It is said that a party 
of British Indians, returning from a Pennsylvania 
raid, left here a sign of their bloody triumph. Be 
that as it may, a posse of Americans suddenly 
appeared on the scene. The entire company of 
ISIoravian sufferers was surrounded and taken 
captive. The question was raised, " Shall we 
take our prisoners to Pittsburg, or kill them ? " 
The answer of the majority was, " Kill." The men 
were hurried into one building and the women 
into another, and the murderers went to work. 

" My arm fails me," said one desperado, as 
he knocked his fourteenth bound victim on the 
head. " I think I have done pretty well. Go 
on in the same way." And that night, as the 
moon arose above the Tuscarawas, the wolves and 
panthers fought in the moonlight for the bodies 
of ninety Christian Indians most foully murdered. 

Had each been his own child, the great grief 



Pilots of the Republic 145 

of the aged Zeisberger could not have been more 
heartrending. After the storm had swept over 
him and a shadow of the old peace came back to 
his stricken heart, Zeisberger called his children 
about him and offered a most patient prayer. 

The record of Zeisberger 's resolute faithfulness 
to the remnant of his church from this time on- 
ward is almost incredible. Like a Moses he led 
them always, and first to a temporary home in 
JNIacomb County, Michigan. From there they 
were in four years driven by the Chippewas. 
The forlorn pilgrims now set sail in two sloops 
on Lake Erie ; they took refuge from a terrible 
storm in the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. 
For a time they rested at a temporary home 
in Independence Township, Cuyahoga County. 
Famine drove them in turn from here. Setting 
out on foot, Zeisberger led them next along tlie 
shore of Lake Erie westward to the present site 
of IMilan, Erie County, Ohio. Here they re- 
sided until the outbreak of the savage Indian 
War of 1791. To escape from this, Zeisberger 
secured from the British government a tract of 



146 Pilots of the Republic 

land twelve miles long and six miles wide for 
the JNIoravian Indians along the Grand River in 
Canada. Here the pilgi'ims remained six years. 
But with the close of the Indian War, it was 
possible for them to return to their beloved 
home in the Tuscarawas Valley. The United 
States had given to the Moravian Church two 
tracts of land here, embracing the sites of the 
three towns formerly built, containing in all 
twelve thousand acres. 

Back to the old home the patriarch Zeisber- 
ger brought his little company in the year 1798. 
His first duty in the gloomy Gnadenhiitten was 
not forgotten. With a bowed head and heavy 
heart the old man and one assistant gathered 
from beneath the dense mass of bush and vine, 
whither the wild beasts had carried them, the 
bones of the ninety and more sacrificed Chris- 
tians, and over their present resting-place one of 
the proudest of monuments now rises. For fuU 
ten years more this hero labored in the shadow 
of the forests where his happiest days had been 
spent, and only as the Winter of 1808 came 



Pilots of the Republic 14)7 

down upon the valley from the lakes did his 
great heart cease beating and his spirit pass 
through the heavenly gates. 

The dust of this true hero lies, as he re- 
quested, surrounded by the remains of those 
" brown brethren " whom he led and loved so 
long, when all the world reviled them and per- 
secuted them and said all manner of evil against 
them falsely. In 1908 the memory of this man 
will have blessed us for a full century. Shall 
not a more appropriate token of our esteem re- 
place the little slab that now marks that hal- 
lowed grave ? And yet no monument can be 
raised to the memory of David Zeisberger so 
valuable or so significant as the little pile of his 
own manuscripts collected by Edward Everett 
and deposited by him under lock and key, in a 
special case in the library of Harvard University. 
Here are fourteen manuscripts, including a Del- 
aware Indian dictionary, a hymn book, a har- 
mony of the Gospels, a volume of litanies and 
liturgies, and a volume of sermons to children. 



CHAPTER VI 

ClarJc's Birth and Parentage. — Wholesomeness of the 
Family's Home Life. — Achievements of George and 
his Five Brothers. — George's Lack of Book-learning. 
— How he became a Surveyor. — Great Opportunities 
enjoyed by Surveyors in his Day. — His Introduction 
to the West. — Learns of George Washirigtons Great 
Acquisitions of Land. — How Chirk acquired his Crav- 
ing for Liquor. — His Acquaintance with the Rev. 
David Jones, Missionary to the Shaxvnees. — Their En- 
campment near the Site of Wheeling, W. Va. — A Trip 
to Pittsburg. — His Claim for a Piece of Land on the 
Ohio. — Takes Service in Dunmore's War. — His Work 
as a Surveyor in Kentuclcy. — Becomes a Leader of 
Pioneers into Kentucky. — The Conflict between Clark 
and the Transylvania Company. — He becomes the 
Leader of the Kentucky Movement. — His Brilliant Mil- 
itary Leadership in the Conquest of Illinois. — The 
Founding of Louisville. — Clark drazvs a Plan of the 
Ftdure City. — His Efforts to induce Immigration to 
the Lower Ohio. — He is discarded by the State of 
Virginia. 



CHAPTER VI 



GEORGE ROGERS CLARK: FOUNDER OF 
LOUISVILLE 

BOUT two miles 
east of Char- 
lottesville, Vir- 
ginia, and more 
than a mile 
south of Thomas 
Jefferson's fa- 
mous homestead, 
Monticello, on a 
sunny knoll by 
the little Rivi- 
anna River, 
stood the humble 

farmer's home in which George Rogers Clark 

was born, November 19, 1752. 

The baby's father and mother, John Clark and 

Ann Rogers Clark, had moved into Albemarle 




152 Pilots of the Republic 

County two years before from King-and-Queen 
County, Virginia, where they had been married 
in 1749. Their first child was born August 1, 
1750, and was given his grandfather's name, 
Jonathan; this second son was given the name 
George Rogers, from one of his mother's 
brothers — as though his parents had looked 
with prophetic vision through the long years to 
a time when the baby should become the idol 
and savior of Kentucky, and had named him 
from a Kentucky pioneer. 

It was a busy farmer's home to which the 
young child came and in which he received the 
first hard lessons of life. His parents were 
sturdy, hard-working people, like their ancestors 
as far back as the records went, even to the first 
John Clark, who came from England to Virginia 
about the same time that the Puritans came to 
Plymouth Rock, or to Giles Rogers, on his 
mother's side, who also came from England at 
very nearly the same time. Giles Rogers's son 
John married Mary BjTd of the well-knowTi 
Virginian Byrd family, and George Rogers 



I 



Pilots of the Republic 153 

Clark's mother was the second daughter of that 
union. 

Who the boy's playmates may have been we 
cannot know; his brother Jonathan was two 
years his elder, and the two were probably com- 
rades together on the nursery floor and on the 
green lawn before the farmhouse. When George 
was three years of age his sister Ann was born; 
and two years after that, in 1757, his brother 
John was born. It has been said that George 
Clark may have had Thomas JeiFerson as a 
playmate by the Rivianna, but there is some 
doubt as to this, though the friendship of the 
two in later life was undoubtedly warmer be- 
cause of the proximity of their boyhood homes. 
George's father's land ran down and adjoined 
that of Randolph Jefferson — Thomas Jeffer- 
son's father. If the two boys who were to 
become so famous met and played together it 
was probably at the Jefferson Mill, where, it is 
said, George Clark used to be sent with grist. 
As the Clark family moved away from this 
neighborhood in 1757, when George was only 



154 Pilots of the Republic 

five years old, it does not seem likely that he 
was sent to mill with grist very often. 

Soon after John Clark, Jr., was born, George's 
father and mother determined upon removing 
from the Rivianna farm to land patented and 
surveyed by Mrs. Clark's father in Caroline 
County, Virginia, on the headwaters of York 
River and just south of the upper Rappahan- 
nock. So, late in the year 1757, we find the 
father and mother and the four children, with 
all their worldly possessions, on their eastward 
journey to their new home. The Rivianna farm 
had been sold for fifteen hundred dollars, and 
the family can probably be said to have been in 
comfortable circumstances for those days. None 
of the four children were of an age to share in 
the hardships of this removal, but for the two 
eldest it must have been an epoch-making event. 
Jonathan and George were old enough to enjoy 
the novelty of the long journey, — the scenes 
along the busy roads, the taverns where all was 
bustle and confusion, the villages with their shops 
and stores, the cities where the children must 



Pilots of the Republic 155 

have felt swallowed up in noise. But at last the 
new home was reached, and the family was busily 
at work preparing for the next year's crops. 

Of the Caroline County home of the Clarks 
we know little save the happy record of births 
of children; yet this in itself gives us a large 
picture of the merry household, its great joys, 
and the host of little troubles which intensified 
the gladness and hallowed it. Within three years 
Richard Clark was born; Edmund was born 
September 25, 1762; Lucy, September 15, 1765; 
Elizabeth, February 11, 1768; William, August 
1, 1770, his brother Jonathan's twentieth birth- 
day; and Frances, January 20, 1773. Jonathan 
and George were soon old enough to be little 
fathers to the younger children, and Ann must 
have been able to help her mother to mend the 
clothes for her rollicking brothers at a compara- 
tively early age; and I do not doubt for a 
moment that there was a good deal of mending 
to be done for these boys, for in later life we 
know they loved adventure, and they must have 
had many a boyish contest of strength and speed 



156 Pilots of the Republic 

with little thought of how many stitches it would 
take to make things whole again. This was a 
fine farmer's family to look in at of a summer's 
morning or a winter's night — just such a family 
as old Virginia was to depend upon in the hard 
days of the Revolution now drawing on apace. 
And though you looked the Colonies through 
from Northern Maine to Southern Georgia, you 
could not have found by another fireside six boys 
in one family who were to gain so much fame 
in their country's service as these six. Jonathan 
was one of the first men to enter the American 
army, and he became a lieutenant-colonel with a 
splendid record before the war was ended. His 
brothers John and Edmund, and perhaps Rich- 
ard, were in the Revolutionary armies; all four 
were recipients of Virginia bounty lands at the 
close of the war. George Rogers Clark in the 
meantime became the hero of the most famous 
military expedition in Western history, — the 
capture of Vincennes and its British fort and 
Governor ; and William, the next to the youngest 
in that merry crowd of ten children, was to write 



Pilots of the Republic 157 

his name high on the pillar of fame as joint 
leader of the memorable Lewis and Clark Expe- 
dition tlirough the Louisiana Territory to the 
Pacific Ocean in 1804. 

It was surely no accident that these lads grew 
into daring, able men, for good blood will tell; 
and Virginia in that day was giving the world 
her richest treasures lavishly on the altar of 
liberty. I know of no picture of the father of 
these six boys; but the pictures of George and 
William are remarkably similar, showing a strong 
mark which must have come directly from one of 
the grandfathers, either on the Clark or Rogers 
side of the family. We may be sure Farmer 
Clark and his wife exerted a strong, wise influ- 
ence on their children, and Jonathan and George 
w^ere called upon at an early age to assist in the 
management of the children, to settle disputes, 
to tie up injured fingers, to reprimand, and to 
praise. And in the school of the home and the 
family circle these boys received the best and 
about the only education they ever had; and it 
would be well if many a boy nowadays would 



158 Pilots of the Republic 

learn more in the home of patient, wise parents 
and a httle less from books. 

The Clark boys, at least George Clark, would 
have been benefited by a little more schooling in 
books, especially a speller. It is quite sure that 
George did not take full advantage of even the 
few school privileges that he did have; but while 
all his letters of later life are poorly spelled, that 
may have been his principal weakness, and in 
other branches he may have succeeded much 
better ; we know he did in one. For nine months 
he was under the instruction of Donald Robert- 
son, under whom James Madison, afterwards 
President of the United States, studied at about 
the same time. Strangely enough this boy, who 
would not learn to be careful with letters, became 
proficient in the matter of figures and did well 
in that most difficult of studies, mathematics. 

In Clark's day a boy proficient in mathe- 
matics did not have to look far for a profession 
which was considered both honorable and lucra- 
tive, and that was the surveyor's profession. It 
was doubly enticing to a youth of brains and 



Pilots of the Republic 159 

daring; the call for surveyors to go out into the 
rich empire beyond the Alleghanies was loud and 
continuous, and had been since Lord Fairfax 
sent that young Virginia surveyor into the sing- 
ing forests of the Upper Potomac before the 
outbreak of the Old French War; and from 
George Washington down, you may count many 
boys who went into the West as surveyors and 
became the first men of the land. The surveyor 
had many, if not all, the experiences of the sol- 
dier ; and every boy in Virginia envied the soldier 
of the French War. The surveyor found the 
good lands, and here and there surveyed a tract 
for himself ; this, in time, would become of great 
value. The surveyor knew the Indians and their 
trails; he knew where the best hunting-grounds 
and salt-licks were located; he knew where the 
swamps lay, and the fever-fogs that clung to 
them ; he knew the rivers, their best fishing-pools, 
and how far up and down they were navigable; 
he was acquainted with everything a man would 
wish to know, and he knew of things which 
every man wished to escape, — floods, famines, 



160 Pilots of the Republic 

skulking redskins, fevers. For these reasons the 
surveyors became the men needed by generals 
to guide the armies, by the great land-companies 
to point out right fields for speculation, by trans- 
portation companies and quartermasters and 
traders to designate the best paths to follow 
through the black forests. The tried, experienced 
surveyor was in an admirable position to secure a 
comfortable fortune for his labor. While Wash- 
ington (the largest landliolder in Ainerica in 
Clark's day — and half his lands in the West) 
selected in person much of his own land, yet, as 
we have seen, the time came when he employed 
William Crawford to find new lands for him. 

Perhaps young Clark came but slowly to a 
realization that he could enter the fine profession 
of a surveyor; but when the time came to decide 
he seized upon the opportunity and the opening 
with utmost enthusiasm and energj^ Both of 
his grandfathers had been surveyors to a greater 
or less extent; possibly their old instruments 
were in his father's possession. If so, these were 
taken out and dusted, and the boy was set to 



Pilots of the Republic 161 

work surveying, probably, his father's farm. Its 
dimensions were well known, and the boy could 
be sure of the accuracy or inaccuracy of his 
experiments. In time George probably was 
called upon to do odd pieces of surveying in the 
neighborhood in which he lived; thus the days 
and the years went by, each one fitting the lad 
for his splendid part on the world's stage of 
action. The first act in the drama was Clark's 
introduction to the West — the land of which he 
had so often dreamed, arid which he now in his 
twentieth year went to see. 

We cannot be sure just when young Clark set 
out from his home, but we find him in the little 
town of Pittsburg early in the summer of 1772, 
and we can well suppose he made the long trip 
over Braddock's Road from Virginia with some 
friends or neighbors from Caroline County, with 
whom he joined himself for the purpose of look- 
ing at the land of which he had heard so much, 
and possibly picking out a little tract of land 
in the Ohio Valley for himself. As a surveyor 
of some experience he was in a position to offer 



162 Pilots of the Republic 

his services to any one desiring them, and thus 
turn an honest penny in the meantime. 

Of the wars and bloody skirmishes fought 
around this town every Virginia boy had heard; 
through all of George Rogers Clark's youth 
great questions were being debated here in these 
sunny Alleghany meadows or in the shadowy 
forests — and the arguments were of iron and 
lead. The French had come down the rivers 
from the Great Lakes to seize the Ohio Valley; 
the colonists had pushed slowly across the Alle- 
ghanies to occupy the same splendid land. Noth- 
ing but war could have settled such a bitter 
quarrel; and, as the Clark boy now looked for 
the first time upon the relics of those small but 
savage battles, his heart no doubt warmed to his 
Virginian patriots who had saved the West to 
America. How little did the lad know that there 
was another savage war to be fought for this 
Ohio Valley, and that he himself was to be its 
hero ! 

All along the route to Pittsburg the boy and 
his comrades, whoever they may have been, kept 



Pilots of the Republic 163 

their eyes open for good farm sites; perhaps 
they were surprised to find that all the land 
beside and adjacent to Braddock's Road was 
already " taken up." Washington himself had 
acquired that two-hundred-and-thirty-two-acre 
tract in Great Meadows where Fort Necessity 
stood; not far from Stewart's Crossing (Con- 
nellsville, Pa.) Washington had the other piece 
of land with the mill on it. Everywhere Clark 
went in the West he found land which had 
been taken up by the shrewd Mount Vernon 
farmer or his agents. I do not believe Clark 
begrudged Washington a single acre, but was, 
on the other hand, pleased to know that the 
Colonel was to receive some good return for all 
his hard campaigning in the West in addition to 
his paltry pay as an officer. 

Clark passed as a young gentleman among the 
strange, rough populace of infant Pittsburg, 
where fighting, drinking, and quarrelling were 
going on in every public place; I can see the 
boy as he went about the rude town and listened 
to the talk of the traders and the loungers who 



164 Pilots of the Republic 

filled the taverns and stores. It might have been 
at this tinie that the boy first began to satisfy an 
honest thirst with dishonest liquids, which would 
in time become his worst enemy and sadly dull 
the lustre of as bright a name as any man could 
win. Of course we must remember that at that 
day it was higlily poUte and gentlemanly to take 
an " eye-opener " every morning and a " night- 
cap " every night, and drink the health of friends 
often between times ; j^et no young man but was 
injured by this awakening of an unknown crav- 
ing, and, in the case of our hero, it was to prove 
a craving that would cost him almost all the great 
honors that he should win. 

The lad looked with T\dde-open eyes, no doubt, 
at the remains of old Fort Duquesne, where 
many brave Virginians had lost their lives; for 
many had been fiendishly put to death by savages 
driven to bitter hatred by French taunts and 
made inliuman by French brandy. He must have 
been greatly interested in little Fort Pitt, which 
had withstood the wild attacks of Pontiac's most 
desperate hell-hounds of war, the Shawnees. 



Pilots of the Republic 165 

Here, if anywhere on the continent, men had 
been brave ; here, if anywhere, men had dropped 
into deathless graves. He was greatly interested 
in the future, though the ringing notes of the 
past must have stirred his heart deeply; and I 
can see the lad with bended head hstening to 
catch every word of a speaker who would talk 
of the present feeling of the dreaded Shawnees, 
who refused to acknowledge that the Six Na- 
tions had any right to sell to white men their 
fine hunting-grounds between the Ohio and the 
Tennessee. 

When we hear directly of Clark in Pittsburg 
he was in admirably good company and well 
spoken of; he had fallen in with the Rev. David 
Jones, the enterprising Baptist missionary from 
New Jersey, who had come into the West on 
a joint mission concerning both the possibil- 
ities of missionary service among the Shawnees 
on the Scioto, and Franklin's proposed settle- 
ment on the eastern bank of the Ohio River. 
He was, therefore, a prospector for land and for 
missionary openings — a good man for the lad 



166 Pilots of the Republic 

Clark to know. Mr. Jones was thirty-six years 
of age, enthusiastic and brave, or he would not 
have been on the Ohio in 1772. He was old 
enough to remember well the story of the Old 
French War, as well as Pontiac's RebeUion, and 
the story of the West from that day down. Of 
this, no doubt, the two talked freely. Mr. Jones 
kept a diary, and his record for Tuesday, June 9, 
reads : "... Left Fort Pitt in company with 
Mr. George Rogers Clark, and several others, 
who were disposed to make a tour through this 
new world." Gliding on down the Ohio, the 
canoe and its adventurous pilgrims were glad to 
get safely by the Mingo town near Steubenville, 
Ohio, whose Indian inhabitants (remnants of the 
Iroquois Indians, in the West known as Min- 
goes) were desperate savages, canoe plundering 
being the least harm that might be expected from 
them. Farther down, at the mouth of Grave 
Creek, near where Wheeling, West Virginia, now 
stands, the party camped ; here Mr. Jones's inter- 
preter, David Owens, joined them, having come 
across country from the Monongahela River. 




Rkv. David Jones 
Companion of George Rogers Clark 



4 



Pilots of the Republic 167 

This spot was to become an important point on 
the Upper Ohio ; it was to become well known to 
the young adventurer, who now looked upon it 
for the first time ; it was soon to become his first 
home in the West. But for the present he went 
on with Mr. Jones. The party proceeded as far 
down as the mouth of the Little Kanawha River, 
where Parkersburg, West Virginia, now stands. 
Returning up the river June 24, they reached 
Grave Creek within two weeks; the party, in- 
cluding at least Higgins and the interpreter 
Owens together with Jones and Clark, started 
on an overland trip to the Monongahela. Jones 
records : 

"... Therefore moved up to Grave Creek, leaving 
there our canoes ; crossed the desart (wilderness) to 
Ten Mile Creek, which empties into [the] Mononga- 
hela. . . . The season was very warm; all except 
myself had loads to carry, so that on the 2d day of 
July, with much fatigue we arrived to the inhabitants 
[at the settlements], faint, weak, weary, and hungry — 
especially Mr. Clark and myself." 

The size of the settlement can be judged from 
the fact that on the second Sunday of JMr. 



168 Pilots of the Republic 

Jones's stay on George's Creek he preached to 
a congregation of about two hundred. 

On July 14 the four travellers set out again 
overland for Fort Pitt. They reached the fort 
on Wednesday, July 22, and the Virginia boy 
was probably glad to leave the forests and the 
river for a while and rest quietly in the little 
village of Pittsburg. For one thing, he had 
some letters to write, and we can imagine how 
anxious the friends at home were to hear from 
him. Would he like the country? Would he 
wish to stay in the West? Would he want the 
other members of the family to emigrate there 
too? These were some of the questions his 
parents and brothers and sisters were asking in 
the old home in Caroline County as the summer 
days went by. We are certain that Clark was 
immensely pleased with all he had seen; whether 
it was pushing a canoe down the rivers, or sleep- 
ing on a river's shore with the water babbling 
beside him, or carrying a pack over the " blind " 
trails of the old Southwest, he loved the land, 
its freshness, the freedom of its forests, the air 



Pilots of the Republic 169 

of hope and adventure which pervaded every- 
thing and everybody. All this appealed to him 
and fascinated him. 

After a good rest he hurried on home in the 
wake of his glowing letters, to enforce them, and 
if possible to induce the home people to come 
quickly to obtain the good lands before they were 
all taken. Before he went it is probable that he 
entered his claim for a piece of land on the Ohio 
near the mouth of Fish Creek, some thirty miles 
below the present site of Wheeling. How in- 
teresting must have been that home-coming! 
What a fine picture that would be, if we could see 
the young lad, who was to be the hero of the West, 
sitting before his father's doorstep, describing 
to a silent audience of relatives and neighbors the 
grandeur and greatness of the West, the crowds 
of immigrants, the growing villages, the con- 
flicts between the white and the red men! Per- 
haps he drew a rough map of the Ohio in the 
sand at the foot of the front doorsteps, showing 
where his claim was located, and where Washing- 
ton's rich tracts were located. Then he told of 



170 Pilots of the Republic 

the Ohio, its islands and its fierce eddies, of the 
Indian trails that wound along on the " hog- 
backs " from settlement to settlement, of the 
great mounds which the ancient giants (as people 
once thought the mound-building Indians were) 
built beside the Ohio. And then at last he told 
of his purpose to return and live in that country 
and grow up with it. 

The records of the next few years were very 
much confused. Young Clark visited various 
portions of the West, perhaps remaining longest 
at a claim he took up near the mouth of Grave 
Creek, on the present site of Moundsville, West 
Virginia, from which point he addressed letters 
to his brother Jonathan, January 9, 1773. In 
the Spring of the next year he formed one of 
Captain Cressap's party assembled at Wheeling 
in readiness for service in Dunmore's War. In 
this war Clark saw considerable service, following 
Dunmore's wing of the army, but not participat- 
ing in the battle at Point Pleasant, which was 
fought by General Lewis. In the Spring of the 
year following, 1775, we find Clark returning 



Pilots of the Republic 171 

again to his original mission in the West, — that 
of surveying land and securing tracts for him- 
self. " I have engaged," he wrote his brother 
Jonathan from Stewart's Crossing, " as a deputy 
surveyor under Cap'n Hancock Lee, for to lay 
out lands on ye Kentuck, for ye Ohio company, 
at ye rate of 80<£ pr. year, and ye privilege of 
taking what land I want." Midsummer found 
him at Leestown, a mile below Frankfort, sev- 
enty miles up the Kentucky River, where he said 
fifty families would be living by Christmas time. 
The public, however, needed the service of the 
young man, and it is plain that his experience 
in the war had been serviceable, for he was made 
commander of the scattered militia of Kentucky. 
During the next Winter, however, we find him 
again in Virginia ; it is probable that his constant 
moving about had brought advantages, though 
his private affairs may have suffered more or less 
from neglect. The Spring of the next year he 
was back in Kentucky, and soon, in no uncertain 
way, the leader of the busy swarms of pioneers. 
" He was brave, energetic, bold," writes William 



172 Pilots of the Republic 

H. English, " prepossessing in appearance, of 
pleasing manners, and in fact with all the quali- 
ties calculated to win from a frontier people. 
The unorganized and chaotic condition of the 
company needed such a man, and the man had 
come." 

It is interesting to notice the conflict which 
was precipitated between Clark as leader of the 
pioneers and Richard Henderson's Transylvania 
Company, and a pleasure to note that Clark 
never seemed to speak or act in a vindictive way 
with reference to Henderson's questionable pur- 
chase; in fact he wrote to his brother in 1775: 

" Colonel Henderson is here and claims all ye country 
below Kentucke. If his claim should be good, land may 
be got reasonable enough, and as good as any in ye 
world. My father talked of seeing this land in August. 
I shall not advise him whether to come or not ; but I am 
convinced that if he once sees ye country he will never 
rest until he gets on it to live. I am ingrossing all ye 
land I possibly can, expecting him." 

It is plain from this quotation that Richard 
Henderson was the friend of the Kentucky 



Pilots of the Republic 173 

pioneer. But there was a very important ques- 
tion to be settled immediately; did Kentucky 
belong to Virginia or was it independent? What 
was its political status? It was decided to get at 
the facts of the case, and Clark was instrumental 
before all others in calling a mass meeting of 
Kentucky pioneers at Harrodstown, June 6, 
1776, where he expected that two or more 
" agents " would be selected by the people with 
general power to consult Virginia as to the legal 
status of " Transylvania." Clark arrived late at 
this meeting, and on arrival found that he him- 
self, and John Gabriel Jones, h!^d been selected, 
not as agents, but as actual " members of the 
Virginia Legislature," to represent a County of 
Kentucky. The Transylvania Company had 
performed its important mission, and Richard 
Henderson was reimbursed for any losses in- 
curred. George Rogers Clark now steps into 
the position occupied by Henderson as the leader 
and sustainer of the Kentucky movement. 

The brilliancy of Clark's military leadership 
during the next few years, while he was effecting 



174 Pilots of the Republic 

a conquest of Illinois, has entirely put into shade 
the genuine influence and merit of his service 
previously rendered. No herald of empire in 
the Middle West who was especiallj^ prominent 
in military affairs did more to accelerate and 
assure the victory of the army of axe-bearing 
pioneers than did George Rogers Clark in these 
critical years, 1775, 1776, and 1777. He fell 
heir, though a mere boy, to a day's responsibility 
and taxing toils relinquished by Richard Hen- 
derson; and it would not be too much to say, 
perhaps, that were we to omit the humble, less 
spectacular services that were performed in these 
three years, or the renowned service heroically 
performed in 1778 and 1779, the nation could 
more easily spare those of the later period. But 
as Clark now went eastward as a delegate to the 
Virginia Legislature, he appreciated more and 
more that the danger of Kentucky lay in the two 
British forts at Kaskaskia and Vincennes; not 
because of the proximity of the troops there 
located, but because of the baneful influence 
exerted upon all the neighboring Indian tribes 



Pilots of the Republic 175 

by English officers and American renegades who 
occupied them. The campaign in IHinois, prose- 
cuted with so much brilHancy and renown, had 
for its vital motive not the conquest of thousands 
of forest-strewn miles of wilderness, but rather 
the salvation of the pioneer settlers in Ken-ta- 
kee. Any other view of the matter would be a 
serious error. 

The proud city of Louisville dates its found- 
ing from Clark's famous Illinois campaign, for 
while descending the Ohio River he left some 
twenty families on Corn Island, May 27, 1778, 
who were the first of their race to make a perma- 
nent home within the sound of the chattering 
waters of the historic Falls of Ohio, first visited 
by La Salle over a hundred years before. In 
less than a year the settlement was moved to the 
Kentucky shore, and a fort was built at the foot 
of what is now Twelfth Street, in what was then 
the town of Falls of Ohio, the present Louisville. 
General Clark may be justly called the founder 
of that city, as it was his decision that made 
" The Falls " the rendezvous and metropolis of 



176 Pilots of the Republic 

the Lower Ohio. " This action," writes Mr. Eng- 
lish, " and the security given by the forts he 
caused to be built there, attracted the first settlers 
and fixed the future destiny of Louisville, Jeif er- 
sonville, and New Albany. . . . Clark undoubt- 
edly gave the matter much thought, and looked 
far into the future in making this selection. He 
expected two great cities to arise some day at the 
Falls; first Louisville, to be followed later, as 
the country became populous, by one on the 
other side of the river, which he hoped would 
bear his name. But, until Virginia made the 
grant for Clarksville, the plan of what he ex- 
pected would be a great city at Louisville ab- 
sorbed his attention." One of his first acts was 
to draw a map of the future city, marking the 
public and private divisions of land as he would 
have had them located; in this plan he left a 
number of vacant spaces for public parks, and it 
is one of the vain regrets of the citizens of the 
present city that the plan of General Clark in this 
respect could not have been remembered. 

It is important to notice that Clark believed 



Pilots of the Republic 177 

that the best way to maintain the conquest of 
Illinois was by inducing immigration to the 
Lower Ohio and the building up of a strong 
pioneer colony, not in Illinois, but along the 
river. " Our only chance at present," he wrote 
to Colonel John Todd, the Governor of Illinois 
County, " to save that country is by encouraging 
the families ; but I am sensible nothing but land 
will do it. I should be exceedingly cautious in 
doing anything that would displease the Govern- 
ment [Virginia], but their present interest, in 
many respects obvious to us here, calls so loudly 
for it, that I think, sir, that you might even ven- 
ture to give a deed for forty or fifty thousand 
acres of land at said place at the price that Gov- 
ernment may demand for it." 

The place referred to here is not Louisville, 
but near the mouth of the Ohio River. In fact 
it is very plain from many sources that Clark was 
the prime mover in the settlement of the Lower 
Ohio up to the year 1783, when he was wantonly 
and ignominiously turned adrift by the State of 
Virginia, which then owed him thirty thousand 



12 



178 Pilots of the Republic 

dollars, with only four shillings in its treasury. 
The latter portion of Clark's life is not one which 
we are proud to remember, but he never sank so 
low that the nation has been able to forget his 
brilliant and persistent courage. There was 
ground for his bitter cry: "I have given the 
United States half the territory they possess, 
and for them to suffer me to remain in poverty, 
in consequence of it, will not redound much to 
their honor." It is little comfort that nearly 
thirteen years after his death the sum justly 
owed to the man was paid to his heirs. The 
memory of Clark's leadership of the army that 
bore the sword is a precious inheritance; the 
facts respecting his equally important enthusiasm 
and earnestness in leading the scattered cohorts 
of the army bearing the broadaxe should likewise 
have a place in history. 



CHAPTER VII 

Importance of the Cumberland Road. — Expected to he a 
Bond of Union between East and West. — Roads of 
Former Days only Indian Trails. — The Cumberland 
Road made between 1806 and 1840. — Promoted by 
Gallatin and Clay. — Undertaken by Congress^ 1802. 

— The Road a Necessity for the Stream of Immigra- 
tion after the Revolution. — Open for Traffic to the Ohioy 
1818. — Other Internal Improvements now undertakeii. 

— The first Macadamized Roads earlier than this Cum- 
berland Road. — The Great Cost of Macadamizing this 
Road. — Disputes as to the Governmenfs Constittdional 
Right to build it. — Ohio demands that the Road be con- 
tinued^ according to the Act admitting her to Statehood. 

— The Road's Progress to Vandalia. — Unanimity of 
Western Members in Favor of the Road. — Toll-gates 
are erected. — Lively Scenes on the Road in Old Times. 

— Sums appropriated for it by Congress. — Why Henry 
Clay championed the Undertaking. 



CHAPTER VII 



HENRY CLAY: PROMOTER OF THE FIRST 
AMERICAN HIGHWAY 

T may be said 
without fear 
of contradiction 
that the subject 
of the Panama 
and Nicaragua 
canals has not 
received more 
popular atten- 
tion in this day 
and generation 
than our first 
and greatest na- 
tional highway — legally known as the Cum- 
berland Road, from its starting point — 
received in the first generation of the nine- 
teenth century. 




182 Pilots of the Republic 

For it was clear to the blindest that the great 
empire west of the Alleghanies, of which Wash- 
ington dreamed and planned, where Zeisberger 
labored and built the first home, and to which 
brave Henderson and Putnam led their colonies 
of patriots, must soon be bound to the Union by- 
something stronger than Indian trails. France 
and England had owned this West and lost it; 
could the little Republic born in the fierce fires 
of 1775 hold what they — proud kingdoms — had 
lost? Could it mock the European doctrine that, 
in time, mountains inevitably become boundaries 
of empires? Those little States of which Berke- 
ley sang, placed by the hand of God as rebukes 
to lustful and universal dominion — were they 
needed in the destinies of America? Such ques- 
tions were asked freely in those hard days which 
succeeded the Revolution. Then the whole world 
looked upon the East and the West as realms as 
distinct as Italy and France, and for the same 
geographical reason. England and Spain had 
their vast " spheres of influence " marked out as 
plainly in America then as Germany and France 



Pilots of the Republic 183 

and Russia have theirs marked in the China of to- 
da^^ Kentucky became a hotbed of foreign emis- 
saries, and the whirl of poHtics in that pivotal 
region a decade after the Revolution will daunt 
even the student of modern Kentucky politics. 
So patriotic and so faithful is that eastern West 
to-day that it is difficult to believe by what a 
fragile tliread it hung to the trembling Repub- 
lic on the Atlantic slope — " one nation to-day, 
thirteen to-morrow " — in those black days when 
Wilkinson and Burr and even George Rogers 
Clark " played fast and loose with conspiracy." 
The Indian trails were the threads which fii'st 
bound the East and the West. Soon a large 
number of these threads were twisted, so to 
speak, into a few cords — hard, rough pioneer 
roadways which wound in and out among the 
great trees and morasses in the forest shades. 
Then came a few great, well-built (for their 
day) roadways which meant as much commer- 
cially and politically, in their age, as the steel 
hawsers which in our time have bound and 
welded a great people so closely together. 



184 Pilots of the Republic 

The greatest of these old-time highways was 
that wide avenue opened from Cumberland, 
Maryland, through Pennsylvania, the " Pan- 
handle," and on across Ohio, between 1806 and 
1840. It is popularly known as the Old National 
Road ; its legal name was the Cumberland Road. 
It was the logical result of Washington's cher- 
ished plan of binding the trans- Alleghany region 
firmly to the East. It was largely promoted by 
Albert Gallatin, who in 1806 made a report, as 
Secretary of the Treasury, strongly urging such 
works of internal improvement. But its best 
friend and stanchest champion was Henry Clay; 
and beside it stands to-day a monument to his 
memory near the little hamlet which bears his 
name — Claysville, Pennsylvania. 

This great road was born in the Act of Con- 
gress of 1802, which enabled the State of Ohio 
to enter the Union. Section VII of that act de- 
creed that the money received from the sale of 
one-twentieth of the public lands in Ohio should 
be applied to building roads from the navigable 
waters of Atlantic streams to and within the new 




Henry C'lav 

Statesman and Altolitionist 



Pilots of the Republic 185 

State " under the authority of Congress." The 
matter was put in charge of the War Depart- 
ment, and soon commissioners appointed by the 
President of the United States were surveying 
a route for a national road from East to West. 
The first government appropriation was dated 
1806, and was thirty thousand dollars. 

Words cannot describe the intense wave of 
enthusiasm which swept over the West when it 
was known that this mighty new power in West- 
ern life was actually to come into existence. 
Our government never carried out a more timely 
or popular measure, for it was as timely as it was 
popular. When the Revolutionary War was 
over, a great stream of immigration poured into 
the West, but the Indian War of 1790-95 severely 
checked it. With the treaty of Greenville the 
great social movement again began, and the War 
of 1812, in turn, again interfered to postpone the 
genuine settlement of the old Northwest. This 
national road was begun at Cumberland, Mary- 
land, in 1811, and, even in the dark daj^s of 
the war, was slowly pushed along over the 



186 Pilots of the Republic 

Alleghanies by way of Uniontown and Washing- 
ton, Pennsylvania, toward Wheeling on the Ohio 
River. When the war was over it was nearing its 
destination, and in 1818 was open for traffic to 
the Ohio. 

If studied closely, the last three years of the 
second decade of the nineteenth century are 
fascinating years to a student of our national ex- 
pansion. The beginning of successful steam nav- 
igation on the Ohio and its tributaries, and the 
completion of the Cumberland National Road to 
the Ohio, were largely responsible for this. Such 
impressive material advances, coming at the time 
when both Great Britain and the Indians had been 
effectually disposed of (so far as national growth 
was concerned), gave enthusiasm to the eager 
spirit of the time. Great deeds were proposed; 
great economic questions began to be faced and 
fought out as never before. The many-sided 
question of internal improvements, the beginning 
of the Erie Canal, the opening of the Lehigh coal 
fields, the problem of applying the power of 
steam to vehicles as well as vessels, the difficult 



Pilots of the Republic 187 

problem solved later by the Missouri Compro- 
mise, and the one involved in Birkbeck's English 
Prairie settlement in Illinois, the problem of 
steam navigation on the Great Lakes, — all these 
and many more like them were the topics of the 
hour when this Cumberland Road, the first of all 
our great feats of improvement, reached and then 
threw itself across the Ohio River. Measured by 
the hopes it inspired and not by miles, judged by 
the power it was expected to exert in national 
life and not by the ruins that now mark its 
ancient track, this road from the Potomac to 
the Mississippi must be considered a most sig- 
nificant monument to those wild but splendid 
years when as a people we were first facing some 
of the most fundamental questions of existence. 
There comes in every boy's life a period when 
he shoots suddenly out and up to the stature of 
a man. Young America sprang up like that in 
those momentous years. 

Nearly a score of years before the Cumber- 
land Road was built, the first macadamized road 
in the United States, the Lancaster Turnpike, 



188 Pilots of the Republic 

was constructed by a private company be- 
tween Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. 
Pennsylvania had macadamized portions of her 
highway across the mountains by way of Cham- 
bersburg and Bedford to Pittsburg. But on 
no highway was the principle of macadamiza- 
tion carried so far as on the Cumberland Road. 
The cost was found to be prodigious. Be- 
tween Cumberland, Maryland, and Uniontown, 
Pennsylvania, it was $9745 per mile instead 
of $6000, which the commissioners estimated, 
without bridging. Between Uniontown and 
Wheeling the cost ran up to the startling aver- 
age of about $13,000 per mile — within $800 of 
the estimated cost per mile of the Erie Canal. 
Too liberal contracts accounted, in part, at least, 
for this extravagance. The stones used were 
reduced to four ounces each and spread in three 
layers, traffic being permitted for a time over 
each layer in succession. No covering was laid 
until these layers had become comparatively solid. 
Catch-water drains, with a gradual curvature, 
were located at proper distances. 



Pilots of the Republic 189 

Several of the officers in charge of the work 
stand high in the estimation of their country- 
men. There was McKee, who fell at Buena 
Vista, and Williams, who gave his life to his 
country at Monterey; there were Gratiot, Dela- 
field. Bliss, Bartlett, Hartzell, Colquit, Cass, 
Vance, Pickell ; and there was Mansfield, who, as 
major-general, fell at Antietam. Among the 
names in one of the surveying corps is recorded 
that of Joseph E. Johnston. 

This national road rested legally upon an 
interpretation of the Constitution held by those 
who favored internal improvement as a means 
of investing the Government's surplus. A great 
plan had been outlined in 1806 by Albert Gal- 
latin, then Secretary of the Treasury. The Con- 
stitution gives the Government the right to 
regulate post-roads and the mails. This implied 
the right, the promoters of internal improvement 
argued, to build roads, with the sanction of 
the States through which such roads passed. 
There were those who opposed the theory, and 
even from the very beginning there was strong 



190 Pilots of the Republic 

opposition by strict constructionists to the road 
appropriations. The very first vote on the first 
appropriation was 66 to 50, showing that at the 
start there was ahnost an even division on the le- 
gality of the question. The opposition increased 
as greater and still greater sums were asked of the 
Treasury each year. Three hundred thousand 
dollars was asked in 1816, and more in 1818. 
In the next year the tremendous amount of 
$535,000 was asked for and voted. It is little 
wonder that Congress was staggered by the 
amount of money absorbed by this one road. 
What if other national roads proposed — through 
the South and northward from Washington to 
Buffalo — should demand equally large sums? 
It was easily to be seen that the entire revenue 
of the Government could readily be spent in fill- 
ing up the bog-holes of American roads with 
limestone. 

Yet the policy of internal improvements was 
a popular one, advocated by politicians and ap- 
plauded by the people; and every year, despite 
the same Constitutional arguments advanced. 




' ^i% 



Albert Gallatin 
Vromoter of the Cumberland Road 



Pilots of the Republic 191 

and though at times the opposing forces had 
their way, the Cumberland Road bills came back 
for reconsideration, and were at last passed. 

But it finally appeared that the matter of get- 
ting the road repaired when once it was built 
was a more serious question than the mere build- 
ing problem. Members of Congress who had 
been persuaded to give their vote for the initial 
expense bolted outright on voting money each 
year to extend the road farther westward and 
also repair the portions already built. The mat- 
ter was precipitated in 1822, when a bill was 
presented to the House and Senate providing 
that toll-gates be erected and that the Govern- 
ment should charge travellers for the use of the 
road. The bill passed both branches of Con- 
gress, but it was vetoed immediately by President 
Monroe on the ground that the national Gov- 
ernment could not collect toll unless, as sovereign, 
it owned the ground that the road occupied. 
This was an interesting question, and one of great 
importance, bringing as it did upon Congress 
an earnest discussion bordering on the intricate 



192 Pilots of the Republic 

problem of States Rights. Mr. Clay urged that 
if the Government had a right to build the road 
it had the right to preserve it from falling into 
decay. Of course there was now, as always, a 
strong opposition to the road on the general 
ground of Constitutionality ; but those who were 
aware that their objections to the road would be 
overruled by the majority, in any event, took the 
consistent ground that if they could not prevent 
the enactments of laws they could, by passing 
laws creating toll-gates, relieve the Government 
at least from the expense of repairing the road. 

As President Monroe, however, did not agree 
with or believe in the original right to build the 
road, he was compelled to deny the Government's 
right to charge toll on roads in the various States. 
He outlined his conclusions and returned the bill 
vetoed. 

A cry which shook the country went up from 
the West. In the act which admitted Ohio to the 
Union, five per cent of money received from the 
sale of lands was, as before noted, to be applied 
by the Government to the building of roads to 



Pilots of the Republic 193 

and in the West. Of this five per cent, three was 
to be devoted to building roads within the State 
of Ohio, and two per cent toward the expense of 
building a road from Atlantic tide-water to Ohio, 
according to a supplementary law passed March 
3, 1803. By allowing the Cumberland Road to 
stop at Ohio's eastern boundary, the Government 
was " breaking faith " with the West. This 
must not be, and therefore in 1824 President 
Monroe found an excuse to sign another Cum- 
berland Road bill. The technicality honestly 
raised by Monroe was against the spirit of the 
times and the genius of the age. Legal techni- 
calities were put aside, and the great road swept 
on westward; it was ordered to be projected 
through the capitals of Ohio, Indiana, and Illi- 
nois to Jefferson, Missouri. It reached Columbus 
in 1833, and Indianapolis about 1840. It was 
graded to Vandalia, then the capital of Illinois, 
and marked out to Jefferson, Missouri, but was 
never completed under national auspices. 

It is to be observed that the Cumberland Road 
went forward largely because of the compact 

13 



194 Pilots of the Republic 

between the State of Ohio and the national Gov- 
ernment. Knowing, as we now do, that the road 
was one of the most important material items in 
our national growth, it must seem fortunate 
from any point of view that the Ohio compact 
was made when and as it was. By its terms the 
Government was to build a road with the money 
accruing from a certain source. The originators 
of the compact seemed to have no real knowledge 
of the questions at issue, either concerning the 
amount of money needed for the purpose of 
building the road from tide-water to the Ohio 
River, or of the amount that was likely to accrue 
from the source indicated. What if the fund 
produced from the sales of land was not suffi- 
cient to build the road? For some time the ap- 
propriations were made on the theory that the 
money would eventually come back into the treas- 
ury from the land sales ; but it soon became plain 
that there was not a hope left that even fifty per 
cent of the amount expended would return from 
the expected source. 

When this fact became patent, the friends of 



Pilots of the Republic 195 

the road were put to their utmost to maintain its 
cause; some interesting points were raised that 
could not but weigh heavily with men of gener- 
ous good sense, such as this: surveys had been 
made outlining the course of the road far in 
advance of the portion that was being actually 
built, and some of the States were planning all 
their roads with reference to this great Appian 
Way that was to be the main highway across the 
continent. Large preparations had been made 
here and there along the proposed route by those 
owning property, in the way of building taverns 
and road houses, not to speak of villages that 
sprang up in a night at points where it seemed 
certain the road would meet important branch 
roads. Throughout the years when the Cumber- 
land Road bills were under discussion it is of par- 
ticular interest to note how men were influenced 
by the greater, more fundamental human argu- 
ments, rather than by mere technical or legal 
points. Of course the Western members were 
without a dissenting voice in favor of the road. 
And when Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri were 



196 Pilots of the Republic 

successively admitted to the Union, a similar pro- 
vision concerning the sale of public lands and 
road-building was inserted as in the case of Ohio ; 
and though it is not clear that any one believed 
the source of income was equal to the object to 
be benefited, yet the magnanimous legislation 
went on without a pause through the twenties 
and into the thirties. In the Senate, for instance, 
the opposition to the road bills could usually 
depend on two solid votes from North Carolina, 
South Carolina, Virginia, and New York; and 
one vote, ordinarily, from Maine, Connecticut, 
New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Tennes- 
see, and Alabama. On minor points other votes 
could be temporarily secured, but on the main 
question there was always a safe majority in 
favor of the enterprise. However, it is plain 
the opposition to the road was sectional only in 
the sense that it came from the States not to be 
directly benefited. Though two or more New 
England votes could be depended upon in the 
Senate to be thrown against a Cumberland Road 
bill, yet such a man as Edward Everett said in 



Pilots of the Republic 197 

an address at Lexington, Kentucky, in 1829: 
" The State of which I am a citizen [Massachu- 
setts] has already paid between one and two thou- 
sand dollars toward the construction and repair 
of that road ; and I doubt not she is prepared to 
contribute her proportion toward its extension 
to the place of its destination." But, it must be 
remembered, Everett was one who caught as few 
others did the spirit of our genius for expan- 
sion, the man who in 1835 uttered the marvellous 
words : " Intercourse between the mighty in- 
terior West and the seacoast is the great principle 
of our commercial prosperity." 

If there is one practical lesson in all the pecul- 
iar history of the one national road that America 
built (for the others proposed were never con- 
structed), it is with reference to the repairing of 
the road. At first it seemed that the great ques- 
tion was merely to obtain funds for the first cost 
of making the road. But it soon appeared that 
the far greater question was to operate and repair 
the road; it was well enough that the Govern- 
ment build the road, seemingly, but it was early 



198 Pilots of the Republic 

realized that a local power must control the road 
and see to its repairs, or an enormous waste of 
pubhc money would result. The experience of 
those years brought home the lesson that the 
problem of maintenance and operation is far 
more serious than the problem of original cost. 

The objection raised to the Government's 
erecting toll-gates and collecting tolls, as imply- 
ing sovereignty over the land occupied by the 
road, was at last silenced by allowing each State 
through which the road passed to accept it from 
the Government as fast as it was completed, and 
to take charge of its operation and control. 
Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio 
accepted completed portions between 1831 and 
1834. Toll-gates were immediately erected by 
State authorities, and tolls collected. From her 
twelve toll-gates Pennsylvania received over 
$37,000 in the twenty months following May 
1, 1843. In the most prosperous year in 
Ohio, 1839, the treasurer of that State received 
$62,496.10 from the National Road tolls. What 
per cent received by toll-gate keepers was 



Pilots of the. Republic 199 

actually turned in cannot be discussed, as those 
were the " good old days." Each toll-gate keeper, 
it must be observed, retained two hundred dollars 
per annum as salary, and five per cent of all 
receipts above one thousand dollars at this time. 
This fast and loose system was the means of dis- 
covering some great rascals. Between 1831 and 
1877 Ohio received $1,139,795.30 from the Cum- 
berland Road in tolls. 

These sober statistics give only a hint of those 
gay, picturesque days when this highway was a 
teeming thoroughfare, lined with towns of na- 
tional importance that are now forgotten, and 
with thousands of taverns and road-houses, even 
the foundation-stones of which have vanished 
from the old-time sites. Great stagecoach lines 
operated here, known as widely in their day as 
the railways are now, their proprietors boasting 
over rival lines in points of speed, safety, and 
appointments. The largest company on the 
Cumberland Road was the National Road 
Stage Company, with headquarters at Union- 
town, Pennsylvania. The Ohio National Stage 



200 Pilots of the Republic 

Company was the most important west of the 
Ohio River. There were the " Good Intent " line, 
and the " Landlords," " Pioneer," " June Bug," 
and " Pilot " lines. Fine coaches bore names 
as aristocratic as our Pullman cars do to-day. 
There were " trusts " and " combinations," quar- 
rels and lawsuits, worthy of the pen of any 
sensational magazine-writer or novelist. 

The advertisement of an " opposition " stage- 
coach line of 1837 is of interest on several 

accounts : 

OPPOSITION ! 

Defiance Fast Line Coaches 

DAILY 

From Wheeling, Va., to Cincinnati, O., via Zanes- 
vllle, Columbus, Springfield, and intermediate points. 

Through in less time than any other line. 
" Bi/ opposition the people are well served." 

The Defiance Fast Line connects at Wheeling, Va., 
with Reside & Co.'s Two Superior daily lines to Balti- 
more, McNair and Co.'s Mail Coach line, via Bedford, 
Chambersburg, and the Columbia and Harrisburg 
Rail Roads to Philadelphia being the only direct line 
from Wheeling — : also with the only coach line from 



Pilots of the. Republic 201 

Wheeling to Pittsburg, via Washington, Pa., and with 
numerous cross hnes in Ohio. 

The proprietors having been released on the 1st inst. 
from burthen of carrying the great mail (which will 
retard any hne), are now enabled to run through in 
a shorter time than any other line on the road. They 
will use every exertion to accommodate the travelling 
public. With stock infinitely superior to any on the 
road, they flatter themselves they will be able to give 
general satisfaction ; and believe the public are aware, 
from past experience, that a liberal patronage to the 
above line will prevent impositions in high rates of 
fare by any stage monopoly. 

The proprietors of the Defiance Fast Line are making 
the necessary arrangements to stock the Sandusky and 
Cleveland Routes also from Springfield to Dayton — 
which will be done during the month of July. 

All baggage and parcels only received at the risk of 
the owners thereof. 

Jno. W. Weaver & Co., 
Geo. W. Manypenny, 
Jno. Yontz, 
From Wheeling to Columbus, Ohio. 
James H. Bacon, 
William Rianhard, 
F. M. Wright, 
William H. Fife, 
From Columbus to Cincinnati. 



202 Pilots of the Republic 

The Cumberland Road became instantly a 
great mail-route to Cincinnati and St. Louis; 
from these points mails were forwarded by 
packets to Louisville, Huntsville, Alabama, 
Nashville, Tennessee, and all Mississippi points. 
Mails from Washington reached the West in 
1837 as follows: 

Washington to Wheeling . . . . . 30 hours 

Washington to Columbus 45^ hours 

Washington to Indianapolis .... 65^ hours 

Washington to Vandalia 85^ hours 

Washington to St. Louis 94 hours 

ISTashville was reached from Louisville by 
packet in twenty-one hours. Mobile in eighty 
hours, and New Orleans in one hundred and 
sixty-five hours. 

Some of the larger appropriations for the 
Cumberland Road were: 

1813 $140,000 

1816 300,000 

1819 535,000 

1830 215,000 

1833 459,000 

1834 750,000 

1835 646,186 

1836 600,000 

1838 459,000 



Pilots of the Republic 203 

The total of thirty-four appropriations 
from March 29, 1806, to June 17, 1844, was 
$6,824,919.33. 

The old road was well built; nothing proves 
this so well as the following advertisement for 
bids for repairing it in Ohio in 1838: 

" Sealed proposals will be received at Toll-gate No. 4, 
until the 6th day of March next, for repairing that 
part of the road lying between the beginning of the 
23rd and end of the 42nd mile, and if suitable bids are 
obtained, and not otherwise, contracts will be made at 
Bradshaw's hotel in Fairview, on the 8th. Those who 
desire contracts are expected to attend in person, in 
order to sign their bonds. 

" On this part of the Road three hundred rods or 
upwards (SS^^ cubic feet each) will be required on each 
mile, of the best quality of limestone, broken evenly into 
blocks not exceeding four ounces in weight each; and 
specimens of the material proposed must be furnished, 
in quantity not less than six cubic inches, broken and 
neatly put up in a box, and accompanying each bid; 
which will be returned and taken as the standard, both 
as it regards the quality of the material and the prep- 
aration of it at the time of measurement and inspection. 



204 Pilots of the Republic 

" The following conditions will be mutually under- 
stood as entering into, and forming a part of the con- 
tract, namely: The 23, 24, and 25 miles to be ready 
for measurement and inspection on the 25th of July; 
the 26, 27, and 28 miles on the 1st of August; the 
29, 30, and 31 miles on the 15th of August; the 32, 
33, and 34 miles on the 1st of September; the 35, 36, 
37 miles on the 15th of September; the 38, 39, and 
40 miles on the 1st of October ; and the 41 and 42 miles, 
if let, will be examined at the same time. 

*' Any failure to be ready for inspection at the time 
above specified, will incur a penalty of five per cent for 
every two days' delay, until the whole penalty shall 
amount to 25 per cent on the contract paid. All the 
piles must be neatly put up for measurement and no 
pile will be measured on this part of the work containing 
less than five rods. Whenever a pile is placed upon 
deceptive ground, whether discovered at the time of 
measurement or afterward, half its contents shall in 
every case be forfeited for the use of the road. 

" Proposals will also be received at the American 
Hotel in Columbus, on the 15th of March, for hauling 
broken materials from the penitentiary east of Colum- 
bus. Bids are solicited on the 1, 2, and 3 miles counting 
from a point near the Toll-gate towards the city. Bids 
will also be received at the same time and place, for 



I 




General Ahthir St. Clair 
Appointed Guvernor of Ohio hi/ Coiii/resa 



Il 



Pilots of the Republic 205 

collecting and breaking all the old stone that lies along 
the roadside, between Columbus and Kirkersville, neatly 
put in piles of not less than two rods, and placed on the 
outside of the ditches." 

The dawning of the era of slack-water naviga- 
tion and of the locomotive brought the public 
to the realization, however, that a macadamized 
road was not in 1838 all the wonder that it was 
thought to be in 1806. But in its day the Cum- 
berland Road was a tremendous power in open- 
ing a new country, in giving hope to a brave but 
secluded people who had won and held the West 
for the Union. This was why Henry Clay cham- 
pioned the movement, and why he should be 
remembered therefor. As a Kentuckian he knew 
the Western problem, and with the swiftness of 
genius he caught the true intent and deeper 
meaning of a great national work such as the 
building of such a material bond of union. 
Nothing has done so much for civilization, after 
the alphabet and the printing press, Macaulay 
has said, as the inventions which have abridged 
distance. In those years, quick with hopes and 



206 Pilots of the Republic 

vast T\dth possibility at the opening of the nine- 
teenth century, the Cumberland Road, stretch- 
ing its yellow coils out across the Alleghanies and 
into the prairies, advanced civiHzation as no other 
material object did or could have done. " If 
there is any kind of advancement going on," 
wrote Bushnell, " if new ideas are abroad and new 
hopes rising, then you will see it by the roads 
that are building." This old road, worn out and 
almost forgotten, its milestones tottering, its 
thousand taverns silent where once all was life 
and merriment, is a great monument of days 
when advancement was a new word, when great 
hopes were rising and great ideas were abroad. 
As such it shall be remembered and honored as 
one of the greatest and most timely acts of pro- 
motion our young Government executed. 



I 



CHAPTER VIII 

Gouvemeur Morris's Day-dream of the Coming Blessings 
of Liberty. — He predicts A rtifcial Channels from the 
Lakes to the Hudson. — The Sight of the Caledonian 
Canal enables him to foresee Wealth for the Interior of 
America. — Seeing Ships on Lake Erie, he predicts tliat 
Ocean Vessels will soon sail on the Lakes. — Inland 
Navigation a Great Factor in this Country''s Develop- 
ment. — Many Rivers not made Navigable for Lack of 
Engineering Skill. — President Jefferson recommends 
that the Surplus in the Treasury be used for Internal 
Improvements. — Jesse Hawley writes Articles in Behalf 
of an Erie Canal. — A Bill in the New York Legisla- 
ture for the Same Object. — Hindrances to the Execution 
of the Project. — Names of Some Notable Friends of the 
Undertaking. — Erie Canal Bill passed by the New York 
Legislature, 1817. — Lack of Good Roads necessitates 
Transportation of Materials for the Canal in Winter 
only. — Other Difficulties. — Clearing away the Timber 
and laying out the Track from Albany to Buffalo. — 
Imported Machinery used for uprooting Trees and 
Stumps. — Neighboring States icrged to Ccmtribute. — 
Cost and Profits both Greater tlian Estimated, — Re- 
joicings at the Opening of the Canal. — The Success of 
this Canal leads to other Enterprises. 



CHAPTER VIII 



MORRIS AND CLINTON: FATHERS OF THE 
ERIE CANAL 

S we survey the 
early period of 
the nation's his- 
tory, there ap- 
pear a number 
of famous con- 
ventions of 
notables which 
will ever live 
in the memory 
of thoughtful 
Amer i c a ns. 
. There are, how- 
ever, a number of such gatherings that are not 
familiar to many, and it is at one of these that 
any story of the far-famed Erie Canal must 
begin. 

14 




210 Pilots of the Bepuhlic 

In the year 1777 General Schuyler's army was 
at Fort Edward, 'New York, during its slow and 
sullen retreat before Burgoyne's advancing red- 
coats. Gouverneur Morris was sent to the army 
at Fort Edward, and on a certain evening, amid 
a company of army officers, that brilliant man 
told a day-dream before the flickering camp-fire. 
The dream concerned the future of America 
when once the foreign yoke should be thrown off. 
In language consonant with the fascinating 
nature of his theme the speaker described in some 
detail what would be the result on the minds and 
hearts of men when liberty for all had been 
secured, and the inspiring advance in arts and 
letters, in agriculture and commerce, that would 
come. He was a dreamer, but his dream became 
a realization and the wonder of young America. 
A comrade that night heard his words. 

" He announced," wrote that person. Governor 
Morgan Lewis, then Quartermaster-General, " in 
language highly poetic, and to which I cannot 
do justice, that at no very distant day the waters 
of the great Western inland seas would, by the 



Pilots of the Republic 211 

aid of man, break through their barriers and 
mingle with those of the Hudson. I recollect 
asking him how they were to break through these 
barriers. To which he replied, that numerous 
streams passed them through natural channels, 
and that artificial ones might be conducted by the 
same routes." 

A number of eminent authorities, such as 
James Geddes, Simeon de Witt, and Elkanah 
Watson, all leave evidence that the idea of a 
canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson was first 
brought to men's attention by the man who told 
his vision to those sleepy Revolutionary officers 
at Fort Edward. 

In his diary of a journey in Scotland in 1795 
Morris thus exclaims at the sight of the Cale- 
donian Canal, " When I see this, my mind opens 
to a view of wealth for the interior of America, 
which hitherto I had rather conjectured than 
seen." Six years later he wrote to a friend, after 
seeing ships on Lake Erie : " Hundreds of large 
ships will, at no distant period, bound on the 
billows of these inland seas. . . . Shall I lead 



212 Pilots of the Bepublic 

your astonishment up to the verge of incredu- 
lity? I will. Know then that one-tenth of the 
expense borne by Great Britain in the last 
campaign would enable ships to sail from Lon- 
don through Hudson's River into Lake Erie." 
Simeon de Witt said in 1822 : " The merit of 
first starting the idea of a direct communication 
by water between Lake Erie and Hudson's River 
unquestionably belongs to Mr. Gouverneur 
Morris. The first suggestion I had of it was 
from him. In 1803 I accidentally met with him 
at Schenectady. We put up for the night at the 
same inn and passed the evening together. He 
then mentioned the project of 'tapping Lake 
Erie,' as he expressed it himself, and leading its 
water in an artificial river, directly across the 
country to Hudson's River." James Geddes 
first heard of the early canal idea from Mr. 
Morris in 1804. " The idea," he said, " of sav- 
ing so much lockage by not descending to Lake 
Ontario made a very lively impression on my 
mind." 

Looking back over the colonial history of 




GOUVERNEUR MoRRIS 
Promoter of the Erie Canal 



Pilots of the Repuhlic 213 

America it is very interesting to note the part 
that was played in our country's development by 
inland navigation. Practically all the commerce 
of the colonies was moved in canoes, sloops, and 
schooners; the large number of Atlantic sea- 
board rivers were the roads of the colonies, and 
there were no other roads. In Pennsylvania and 
Georgia a few highways were in existence; in 
the province of New York there were only twelve 
miles of land carriage. Villages, churches, and 
courthouses in Maryland and Virginia were al- 
most always placed on the shore of the rivers, 
for it was only by boat that the people could 
easily go to meeting or to court. Indeed the 
capital of the country, Washington, was located 
upon the Potomac River, partly for the reason 
that its founders believed that the Potomac was 
to be the great commercial highway of the 
eastern half of the continent. 

As roads were the arteries of trade and travel 
it was natural for our forefathers to hold the 
opinion that to increase the commerce of the coun- 
try it was necessary only to increase the number 



214 Pilots of the Republic 

of navigable miles of the rivers. The story of 
the struggle to improve the navngation of the 
two rivers, JNIohawk and Hudson, upon which 
the attention of our earliest engineers centred, 
occupies other pages of this volume; and 
it is for us to note here the fact merely in 
passing that, beginning with 1786, strenuous 
efforts were made to render these waterways, 
and a large number of less important rivers, 
navigable. The efforts failed of success, the 
reason being that engineering skill was not of 
a grade high enough to master the problem. 
And consequently, when the nineteenth century 
dawned, we may say with fair regard to truth 
that the campaigns that had been waging in a 
number of the States for the betterment of 
America's navigation by means of improved 
rivers had failed and were discarded. 

Then it was that public attention was turned 
to the subject of making artificial water channels, 
or canals. Generations before this, the great 
Forth and Clyde Canal in Scotland had been 
completed by Smeaton; the Royal Canal in 



Pilots of the Republic 215 

Ireland was finished in 1792 ; the Schuylkill and 
Susquehanna Canal in Pennsylvania had been 
surveyed in 1762, and a few miles of it had been 
dug in 1794; the Chesapeake and Delaware 
Canal, though surveyed as early as 1764, was not 
begun until 1804. 

It was natural, therefore, that the idea of a 
canal between the Hudson and Lake Erie should 
have presented itself forcibly to New Yorkers 
at this time, and all the latent possibilities were 
aroused to activity in 1807 by the recommenda- 
tion made by President Jefferson in his message 
to Congress in October, that the surplus money 
in the Treasury of the United States be used 
for undertaking a large number of internal 
improvements. Whether or not Jefferson's 
recommendation or some other preliminary pro- 
posal of this kind may have inspired it, a New 
Yorker named Jesse Hawley was now pre- 
paring a series of articles advocating a canal 
between the Hudson and the Lakes. Before 
these articles, to which the name of " Hercules " 
was signed, were ready to appear in print. 



216 Pilots of the Republic 

Mr. Hawley changed his place of residence to 
Pittsburg, and, oddly enough, it was in " The 
Commonwealth," a Pittsburg paper, that the 
first published broadside in behalf of an Erie 
canal appeared; this was on the fourteenth daj?- 
of January, 1807. This series of articles, as a 
whole, appeared in " The Genesee Messenger," 
of Canandaigua, weekly from October, 1807, to 
March, 1808. The author had studied the prob- 
lem with great earnestness, though the Mohawk 
River was to be used as a part of the system. 
In February of the following year the idea 
gained added impetus and circulation by a bill 
offered in the New York Legislature ; its author 
was Joshua Forman, a member from Onondaga 
County, and it read as follows: 

" Whereas the President of the United States by his 
message to Congress, delivered at their meeting in Octo- 
ber last, did recommend that the surplus money in the 
treasury, over and above such sums as could be applied 
to the extinguishment of the national debt, be appro- 
priated to the great national objects of opening canals 
and making turnpike roads; And whereas the State 
of New York, holding the first commercial rank in the 



Pilots of the Bepuhlic 217 

United States, possesses within herself the best route 
of communication between the Atlantic and Western 
waters, by means of a canal between the tide-waters of 
the Hudson River and Lake Erie, through which the 
wealth and trade of that large portion of the United 
States bordering on the upper lakes would for ever 
flow to our great commercial emporium; And whereas 
the Legislatures of several of our sister States have 
made great exertions to secure to their own States 
the trade of that wide-extended country west of the 
AUeghanies to those of this State; And whereas it 
is highly important that these advantages should as 
speedily as possible be improved, both to preserve and 
increase the commerce and national importance of this 
State: Resolved (if the honourable the Senate concur 
herein), that a joint committee be appointed to take 
into consideration the propriety of exploring, and 
causing an accurate survey to be made of, the most 
eligible and direct route for a canal to open a communi- 
cation between the tide-waters of the Hudson River and 
Lake Erie; to the end that Congress may be enabled 
to appropriate such sums as may be necessary to the 
accompHshment of that great national object." 

For a number of years the great project was 
held in abeyance by a series of unforeseen events. 



218 Pilots of the Republic 

First among these was the War of 1812, during 
which the State of New York was the frontier 
and saw a number of the most important cam- 
paigns. Then, too, the inherent difficulties of the 
project — the vast amount of ground necessarily 
to be covered, the low plane of engineering 
science at that day, the immeasurable difficulties 
of gaining access to the interior of a heavily 
wooded country, the low ebb of the financial con- 
dition of the State — all combined to strengthen 
the opposition to the canal. But its friends grew 
in number and steadily grew in power. First 
among them was Governor Clinton, who was so 
closely allied with the great undertaking that its 
enemies frequently called it " Clinton's Ditch "; 
Gouverneur Morris, Fulton, and Livingston 
(who were just now succeeding in their steam- 
boat enterprise), Simeon de Witt, Thomas 
Eddy, General Philip Schuyler, Chancellor Kent, 
and Judges Yates and Piatt are remembered as 
the most influential promoters of America's first 
great work of internal improvement. 

Strangely enough, one of the most serious 



Pilots of the Reimblic 219 

hindrances to the beginning of the work proved 
in the end to be the great argument in its favor, 
and that was the War of 1812. The act which 
gave birth to the canal was passed by the New 
York Legislature April 15, 1817, and then went 
before the Council of Revision. " The ordeal 
this bill met with in the Council of Revision," 
writes M. S. Hawley in his valuable pamphlet,^ 
" came near being fatal to it; it could not have 
received a two-thirds vote after a veto. The 
Council was composed of Lieutenant-Governor 
John Taylor, — acting Governor, as President of 
the Council, — Chief Justice Thompson, Chan- 
cellor Kent, and Judges Yates and Piatt. Act- 
ing Governor Taylor was openly opposed to the 
whole scheme. The Chief Justice was also op- 
posed to this bill. Chancellor Kent was in favor 
of the canal, but feared it was too early for the 
State to undertake this gigantic work. Judges 
Yates and Piatt were in favor of the bill; but 
it was likely to be lost by the casting vote of 
the acting Governor. Vice-President Tompkins 

» " The Origin of the Erie Canal." 



220 Pilots of the Republic 

(recently the Governor) entered the room at 
this stage of the proceedings, and, in an in- 
formal way, joined in conversation upon the 
subject before the Council, and in opposition to 
this bill. He said : ' The late peace with Great 
Britain was a mere truce, and we will undoubt- 
edly soon have a renewed war with that country ; 
and instead of wasting the credit and resources 
of the State in this chimerical project, we ought 
to employ all our revenue and credit in preparing 
for war.' 

" ' Do you think so, sir? ' said Chancellor Kent. 

" ' Yes, sir,' replied the Vice-President; ' Eng- 
land will never forgive us for our victories, and, 
my word for it, we shall have another war with 
her within two years.' 

" The Chancellor, then rising from his seat, 
with great animation declared, 

" ' If we must have war ... I am in favor 
of the canal, and I vote for the bill.' 

" With that vote the bill became a law." 

It is difficult for us to-day to realize what a 
tremendous undertaking it was to try to throw 



Pilots of the Republic 221 

this great " Ditch " of Chnton's across those 
hundreds of miles of forest and swamp which, 
for so many generations, had been known as the 
" Long House of the Iroquois." As you fly 
through that beautiful territory watered by the 
Mohawk, Seneca, and Onondaga rivers to-day, 
it is hardly possible to re-create, with any meas- 
ure of truth, the old-time appearance of the land. 
It was well into the nineteenth century before 
a good road was ever built in Central New York ; 
indeed, during the years while the Erie Canal 
was being built, the necessary materials for the 
building, and provisions for the builders, were 
transported thither in the winter season because 
at that time only was it accessible by any known 
means of transportation. Think what it meant, 
then, to dig a great trench through the heavily 
wooded region where even the road-builders had 
not had the temerity to go. It was the forest 
growth that held back the road-maker; the 
tangled forest, the heavily wooded overgrowth 
that bound the heavy trees inextricably together. 
The canal-builder had all that the road-maker 



222 Pilots of the Republic 

found to combat with above the ground, — the 
tangled mesh of bush, vine, and tree, — but he 
had also what was far more difficult to attack and 
conquer, namely, the tremendous labyrinth of 
roots that lay beneath the ground. Thus, his task 
was double that of the road-maker; and look as 
far as you will through our early history, you will 
not find an enterprise launched on this continent 
by any man or any set of men that will compare 
in daring with the promotion of this great w^ork 
of interior improvement to which New York 
now set herself. 

For there was no hesitating. Within a very 
few days of the passing of the act creating the 
Erie Canal you could have seen surveyors and 
chainmen pushing out into the shadowy forest- 
land, driving five lines of stakes across 'New York 
toward the setting sun. These men, like those 
who sent them, were ridiculed everywhere they 
went by some of the people ; but still the ringing 
blows grew fainter and fainter as those five lines 
of stakes crept on up the Mohawk, along the 
Seneca, through poisonous swamps, on the banks 



Pilots of the Republic 223 

of running rivers, around the shores of the still- 
lying lakes. Those who ridiculed prophesied 
that next we would be building a bridge across 
the Atlantic, and then a tunnel to China beneath 
the Pacific; but the sneers and ridicule of that 
portion of the people that will be fools all the 
time could not stop those earnest stake-drivers 
or the small army of men, mostly Americans, 
who came in and worked with pick, shovel, and 
wheelbarrow. 

The two outer lines of stakes were sixty feet 
apart; this indicated the space from which the 
forest was to be cleared. Two lines of stakes 
^^^thin these, measuring forty feet apart, repre- 
sented the exact width of the proposed canal; 
and the remaining single line of stakes located 
its mathematical centre. The whole distance of 
the canal from Albany to Buffalo was divided 
into three sections, and these sections were sub- 
divided into very small portions, which were let 
to contractors. The first contract was signed 
June 27, 1817, and work was begun at historic 
Rome, New York, on the following Fourth of 



224 Pilots of the Republic 

July, with appropriate ceremony. After a short 
address by one of the commissioners, Samuel 
Young, and amid a burst of artillery, Judge 
Richardson, the first contractor, threw out the 
first spadeful of earth. 

To present-day readers acquainted with so 
many wonderful feats of engineering of modern 
days, the history of the building of this canal 
must seem conmionplace; the marvellous thing 
about it, after all, was its conception and the 
campaign of education which brought about its 
realization. One of the romantic phases of the 
story, that T\dll forever be of interest to those 
of us who can never laiow a primeval forest, was 
the experience of the engineering corps crashing 
their way through the New York forests, where 
the surveyors' stakes could hardly be seen in the 
dense gloom. INIachinery unknown in America 
at the time was called upon to perform this 
arduous labor of grubbing and clearing this sixty- 
foot aisle. One machine, working on the princi- 
ple of an endless screw connected with a cable, 
a wheel, and a crank, enabled a single man to 



Pilots of the Republic 225 

haul down a tree of the largest size without any 
cutting. The machine being located at a distance 
of one hundred feet from the foot of the tree, 
the cable was attached to the trunk fifty or sixty 
feet from the ground, a crank was turned, the 
screw revolved, and the tree was soon prostrated, 
as the force which could be exerted by this prin- 
ciple was irresistible. 

A machine for hauling out stumps was con- 
structed and operated as follows: 

" Two strong wheels, sixteen feet in diameter, are 
made and connected together by a round axle-tree, 
twenty inches thick and thirty feet long; between these 
wheels, and with its spokes inseparably framed into their 
axle-tree, another wheel is placed, fourteen feet in di- 
ameter, round the rim of which a rope is several times 
passed, with one end fastened through the rim, and 
with the other end loose, but in such a condition as to 
produce a revolution of the wheel whenever it is pulled. 
This apparatus is so moved as to have the stump, on 
which it is intended to operate, midway between the 
largest wheels, and nearly under the axle-tree ; and these 
wheels are so braced as to remain steady. A very strong 
chain is hooked, one end to the body of the stump, or 

IS 



226 Pilots of the Republic 

its principal root, and the other to the axle-tree. The 
power of horses or oxen is then applied to the loose 
end of the rope above mentioned, and as they draw, 
rotary motion is communicated, through the smallest 
wheel, to the axle-tree, on which, as the chain hooked 
to the stump winds up, the stump itself is gradually 
disengaged from the earth in which it grew. After 
this disengagement is complete, the braces are taken 
from the large wheels, which then afford the means of 
removing that stump out of the way, as well as of 
transporting the apparatus where it may be made to 
bear on another." 

An implement devised for the underground 
work demanded on the Erie Canal was a peculiar 
plough having a very heavy blade by which the 
roots of the trees were cut; two yoke of oxen 
could draw this plough through any mesh of 
roots none of which exceeded two inches in 
diameter. 

The middle section of the canal, from Rome 
to Lockport, was completed in 1819, twenty- 
seven miles being navigable in that year. By 
1823 the canal was opened from Rochester to 
Schenectady. Water was admitted into the canal 



Pilots of the Republic 227 

between Schenectady and Albany in October of 
that year; and by September, 1824!, the hne was 
completed from Lockport to Black Rock Harbor 
on Lake Erie. 

In evidence of what the promoters of the Erie 
Canal expected that highway would be to the 
Central West we find this interesting fact : 
Ohio, and even Kentucky, were called upon offi- 
cially to aid in raising the funds for its building. 
Indeed, the commissioners in 1817 went so far 
as to utter a threat against the States lying on 
each side of New York in case they should not 
be willing to contribute to the building of this 
commercial route, which was to be for their com- 
mon benefit; this consisted in a threat to charge 
high duties on articles transported to and from 
those States and the Territories of the United 
States. It would seem as though 'New York 
never expected to be compelled to finance, un- 
assisted, the great work of improvement which 
she began in 1817. Agents went canvassing for 
her both in Vermont on the east and in Ohio on 
the west for the purpose of raising contributions 



228 Pilots of the Republic 

to the canal fund. Agents also were sent to 
the national Government at Washington, and it 
was beHeved that national aid could perhaps be 
secured from the sale of the public lands in 
JNIicliigan, very much in the same way as the old 
National Road was paid for in part by the sale 
of lands in Ohio a decade before. Though as- 
surances of interest and sjTnpathy were forth- 
coming from the Government and from all the 
interested States, there is no e^adence at hand to 
show that New York was aided to the extent of a 
single penny from any extraneous source. To 
this fact, we shall see in another chapter, may be 
charged the opposition of New York delegates in 
Congress to many government-aid propositions 
that came up in the era of internal improvements. 
As is usually the case, the expense of this 
great work exceeded all the scheduled estimates; 
but, as has seldom if ever been the case with 
works of this character, the receipts from the 
tolls on the Erie Canal also exceeded all esti- 
mates. In only eight years follomng the com- 
pletion of the canal the receipts from it exceeded 



Pilots of the Republic 229 

all estimates by nearly two and one-quarter mil- 
lions of dollars, whereas the total cost of the 
canal, including the amount required for com- 
pletion and payment of all claims at the close 
of the year 1824, was only $7,700,000. Indeed, 
the success of the canal was so great that it was 
hardly completed before plans for an enlarge- 
ment were necessary. 

Yet on its completion a great celebration was 
held, which probably was the most picturesque 
pageant ever seen on this continent to that time. 
For many days previous to the completion of 
the work, committees in all the cities and villages 
throughout the route of the canal were preparing 
to do honor to Governor Clinton as he should 
make a triumphal tour from end to end in the 
first boat that made the journey. Looking back 
through the years, the scene presented of the 
Governor of that State sailing in a little flotilla 
of canal boats from Buff'alo to Albany, the 
violent rejoicing of political friends along 
the route, the demonstrations and orations by 
the score, the transparencies, illuminations, and 



230 Pilots of the Republic 

jollifications, stand without a parallel in the 
early history of our country. At the moment 
when Clinton's boats weighed anchor at Buf- 
falo, a burst of artillery sent the message east- 
ward; cannon located along the route took up 
the message, and in comparatively few moments 
it was passed across the State to the metropolis. 
When Clinton reached New York, the canal 
boats having been towed down the Hudson, a 
spectacular ceremony was performed oiF Sandy 
Hook, where a keg of Lake Erie water was 
poured into the sea in commemoration of the 
wedding of the ocean and the lakes. The pro- 
cession in New York City was the greatest, it is 
said, that had ever formed in America up to that 
time. The illuminations were in harmony with 
the whole scale of the celebration, as was true 
of the grand ball in Lafayette Amphitheatre 
in Laurens Street; here, in order to secure 
necessary floor space, a circus building on one 
side and a riding-school on the other were tem- 
porarily united to make the largest ballroom in 
America. 




De Witt Clinton 

Frifud of the Ei'ifi, Canal Project 



Pilots of the Republic 231 

The Erie Canal was of tremendous national 
importance in more ways than it is possible to 
trace. The hopes and dreams of its promoters 
were based on such sound principles, and the 
work they planned was so well executed, that 
the success of their adventure gave inspiration 
to hundreds of other enterprises throughout 
the length and breadth of the country. That 
was the Erie Canal's great mission. It is hardly 
necessary to say that the State of New York 
reaped a great benefit from the successful prose- 
cution of the work. But it was not New York 
alone that benefited; for the Erie Canal was 
the one great early school of civil engineers in 
the United States, and in all parts of the country, 
from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Balti- 
more to the Portland Canal at far-away Louis- 
ville, Kentucky, the men who engineered New 
York's great canal found valuable work to do. 

It is most remarkable that now, at the begin- 
ning of another century, the people of New 
York should be planning a new Erie Canal; 
and perhaps the most significant fact in 



232 Pilots of the Republic 

connection with the one-thousand-ton barge canal 
now projected is the fact that wherever rivers 
are available, as for instance the Mohawk, these 
are to be taken advantage of, showing that 
modern engineering science approves the early 
theory entertained by Washington and Morris 
of the canalization of rivers. The old Erie 
Canal cost upwards of eight millions, which was 
deemed an immense sum at that day. It is 
difficult always to measure by any monetary 
standard the great changes that the passing 
years have brought; but the new canal now to 
be built is to cost one hundred and one millions, 
which is in our time a comparatively moderate 
sum. The influence of the building of the old 
canal spread throughout the nation, and scores i| 
of canals were projected in the different States; 
it seems now that the influence of the promotion 
of the new Erie Canal will likewise be felt 
throughout the country. New York again leads 
the way. 



CHAPTER IX 

Tlie Demand for Canals and Navigable Rivers. — Washing- 
ton'' s Search for a Route for a Canal or Road to hind the 
East and West. — Much Money spent in the Attempt to 
make Certain Rivers Navigable. — Failure of the Poto- 
mac Company to improve Navigation on the Potomac. 

— The Need for a Potomac and Ohio Canal to with- 
hold the Western Trade from, the Erie. — The Potomac 
Canal Company ^re-nam^d the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal 
Company. — Apparent Impossibility of building a Canal 

from the Potomac to Baltimore. — Philip E. Thomas 
conceives the Idea of a Railroad from Baltimore to the 
West. — The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company''s 
Jealousy of this Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company. 

— Both the Canal and the Railroad started. — Diffi- 
culties in the Way of Both. — The CanaVs Exclusive 
Right of Way up the Potomac to be now shared with 
the Railroad. — The Railroad completed to the Ohio, 
1853. — A Canal from Philadelphia to Pittsburg built 
rapidly. — The Alleghany Portage Railway opened for 
Traffic in Three Years. — Washington'' s Efforts to ac- 
complish the Same End. — The Railways to a Large 
Extent supersede the Canals, 



CHAPTER IX 



THOMAS AND MERCER: RIVAL PROMOTERS OF 
CANAL AND RAILWAY 

LTHOUGH 

the Cumberland 
National Road 
proved a tre- 
mendous boon 
to the young 
West and meant 
to the East 
cormnercially all 
that its promot- 
ers hoped, other 
means of trans- 
portation were 
being hailed loudly as the nineteenth century 
dawned. Improved river-navigation was one of 
these, and canals were another. When it was 
fully realized how difficult was the transportation 




236 Pilots of the Republic 

of freight across the Alleghanies on even the best 
of roads, the cry was raised, " Cannot waterways 
be improved or cut from Atlantic tide-water to 
the Ohio River?" 

In our story of Washington as promoter and 
prophet it was seen that at the close of the Revo- 
lution the late commander gave himself up at 
once to the commercial problem of how the Poto- 
mac River might be made to hold the Middle 
West in fee. Passing westward in the Fall of 
1784, he spent a month in the wilds of Northern 
Virginia seeking for a pathway for canal or road 
from the South Branch of the Potomac to the 
Cheat River. The result of his explorations was 
the classic letter to Harrison in 1784, calling 
Virginia to her duty in the matter of binding the 
East and West with those strongest of all bonds 
— commercial routes bringing mutual benefit. 

The immediate result was the formation of 
the Potomac Company, which proposed to im- 
prove the navigation of the Potomac from tide- 
water, at Washington, D. C, to the highest 
practicable point, to build a road from that point 



Pilots of the Republic 237 

to the nearest tributary of the Ohio River, 
and, in turn, to improve the navigation of that 
tributary. 

One stands aghast at the amount of money 
spent by our forefathers in the sorry attempt 
to improve hundreds of unnavigable American 
rivers. You can count numbers of them, even 
between the Mohawk and Potomac, which were 
probably the poorest investments made by early 
promoters in the infant days of our Republic. 
When, in the Middle Ages, river improvement 
was coromon in Europe, it was proposed to 
make an unnavigable Spanish river navigable. 
The plan was stopped by a stately decree of 
an august Spanish council on the following 
grounds: "If it had pleased God that these 
rivers should have been navigable. He would 
not have wanted human assistance to have made 
them such; but that, as He has not done it, it 
is plain that He did not think it proper that it 
should be done. To attempt it, therefore, would 
be to violate the decree of His providence, and 
to mend these imperfections which He designedly 



238 Pilots of the Republic 

left in His works." It is certain that stock- 
holders in companies formed to improve the 
Potomac, Mohawk, Lehigh, Susquehanna, and 
scores of other American streams would have 
heartily agreed that it was, in truth, a sacrilege 
thus to violate the decrees of Providence. 

With Washington as its president, however, 
the Potomac Company set to work in 1785 to 
build a canal around the Great Falls of the 
Potomac, fifteen miles above Washington, D. C, 
and blast out a channel in the rocky rapids at 
Seneca Falls and Shenandoah Falls. Even dur- 
ing Washington's presidency, which lasted until 
his election as President of the United States 
in 1788, there was great difficulty in getting the 
stockholders to remit their assessments. Other 
troubles, such as imperfect surveys, mismanage- 
ment, jealousy of managers, and floods, tended 
to delay and discourage. The act of incorpora- 
tion demanded that the navigation from tide- 
water to Cumberland, Maryland, be completed 
in three years. Nearly a dozen times the Legis- 
latures of Maryland and Virginia, under whose 



Pilots of the Republic 239 

auspices the work was jointly done, postponed 
the day of reckoning. By 1820 nearly a million 
dollars had been emptied into the Potomac 
River, and a commission then appointed to ex- 
amine the Company's affairs reported that the 
capital stock and all tolls had been expended, a 
large debt incurred, and that " the floods and 
freshets nevertheless gave the only navigation 
that was enjoyed." 

By this time the Erie Canal had been partly 
formed, and it was clear that it would prove a 
tremendous success; its operation was no longer 
a theory, and freight rates on merchandise across 
New York had dropped from one hundred dol- 
lars to ten dollars a ton. Of the many canals 
(which were now proposed by the score) the 
Potomac Canal, which should connect tide-water 
with the Ohio River by way of Cumberland and 
the Monongahela River, was considered of prime 
importance. Virginia and Maryland (in other 
'words, Alexandria and Baltimore) had held, by 
means of the roads they had built and promoted, 
the trade of the West for half a century. The 



240 Pilots of the. Republic 

Erie Canal seemed about to deprive them of it 
all; the Potomac Canal must restore it! So the 
Virginians believed, and on this belief they 
quickly acted. The Potomac Canal Company — 
soon re-named the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal 
Company — was formed, and chartered by Vir- 
ginia. Maryland hesitated; could Baltimore be 
connected by canal with the Potomac Valley? 
Before this doubt was banished a national com- 
mission had investigated the country through 
which the proposed canal was to run, and reported 
that its cost (the Company was capitalized at six 
millions) would exceed twenty millions! The 
seventy miles between the Potomac and the head 
of the Youghiogheny alone would cost nearly 
twice as much as the entire capital of the Com- 
pany! And soon it became clear that it was 
impossible to build a connecting canal between 
the Potomac and Baltimore. 

The situation now became intensely exciting. 
A resurvey of the canal route lowered the 
previous high estimate, and the Virginians and 
Mary landers (outside of Baltimore) believed 



Pilots of the Repuhlic 241 

fully that the Ohio and the Potomac could be 
connected, and that the Erie Canal would not, 
after all, monopoUze the trade of the West. 
Alexandria and Georgetown would then become 
the great trade centres of the continental water- 
way from tide-water to the Mississippi basin, — 
in fact, secure the position Baltimore had held 
for nearly a century. Baltimore had been a 
famous market for Western produce during the 
days of the turnpike and " freighter " ; the rise 
of the easy-gliding canal-boat, it seemed, was to 
put an end to those prosperous days. Trade 
already had become light; Philadelphia was 
forging ahead, and even New York seemed 
likely to become a rival of Baltimore's. 

A Baltimore bank president — whose name 
must be enrolled high among those of the great 
promoters of early America — sat in his office 
considering the gloomy situation. That he saw 
it clearly there is no doubt ; very likely his books 
showed with irresistible logic that things were 
not going well in the Maryland metropolis. This 
man was Philip Evan Thomas, president of the 



16 



242 Pilots of the Republic 

Mechanics' Bank. Before many days he con- 
ceived the idea of building a raih'oad from Balti- 
more to the West, which would bring back the 
trade that had been slipping away since the turn- 
pike roads had been eclipsed by the canal. Balti- 
more's position necessitated her relying on roads ; 
so far as the West was concerned there were no 
waterways of which she could avail herself. 
Railroads had been proving successful; one in 
Massachusetts three miles long served the pur- 
poses of a common road to a quarry advan- 
tageously. At Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, a 
railroad nine miles long connected a coal mine 
and the Lehigh River. Heavy loads could be 
deposited on the cars used on these roads, and 
on a level or on an upgrade horses could draw 
them with ease. If a short road was practi- 
cable, why not a long one? A three-hundred- 
mile railroad was as possible as a nine-mile 
road. Mr. Thomas admitted to his counsels 
Mr. George Brown; each had brothers in Eng- 
land who forwarded much information concern- 
ing the railway agitation abroad. On the night 



Pilots of the Republic 243 

of February 12, 1826, an invited company of 
Baltimore merchants met at Mr. Thomas's home, 
and the plan M'as outlined. A committee was 
appointed to review the situation critically and 
report in one week. On February 19 the report 
was made, unanimously urging the formation 
of a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company. 

The intense rivalry of the Chesapeake and 
Ohio Canal Company and the Baltimore and 
Ohio Railroad Company forms of itself a his- 
torical novel. The name " Ohio " in their legal 
titles signifies the root of jealousy. The trade of 
the " Ohio country," which included all the trans- 
Alleghany empire, was the prize both companies 
would win. The story is the more interesting 
because in the long, bitter struggle which to its 
day was greater than any commercial warfare of 
our time, the seemingly weaker company, handi- 
capped at every point by its stronger rival, 
and also held back because of the slow advance 
of the discoveries and improvements necessary 
to its success, at last triumphed splendidly in the 
face of every difficulty. 



244 Pilots of the Republic 

The first act in the drama was to hold rival 
inaugural celebrations. Accordingly, on July 4, 
1828, two wonderful pageants were enacted, one 
at Baltimore and the other at Washington. At 
Baltimore the aged Charles Carroll of CarroUton, 
the only surviving signer of the Declaration of 
Independence, laid the " cornerstone " of the 
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. At Washington, 
President John Quincy Adams, amid the cheer- 
ing of thousands, lifted the first spadeful of 
earth in the great work of digging a canal from 
Washington to Cumberland. The fact that the 
spade struck a root was in no wise considered 
an ill omen. Redoubling his efforts. President 
Adams again drove the implement into the 
ground. The root held stoutly. Whereupon the 
President threw oiF his coat, amid the wildest 
cheering, and, with a powerful effort, sent the 
spade full length downward and turned out its 
hallowed contents upon the ground. Washing- 
ton, Georgetown, and Alexandria were repre- 
sented by dignified officials. Baltimore, so long 
mistress of the conmierce of the West, was 



Pilots of the Republic 245 

now to be distanced by the Potomac Valley 
cities. 

And it was soon seen that the Canal Company 
did hold the key to the situation. Having in- 
herited the debts and assets of the old Potomac 
Company, it also inherited something of more 
value, — that priceless right of way up the 
Potomac Valley, the only possible Western route 
through Maryland for either a canal or a rail- 
road. The railroad struck straight from Balti- 
more toward Harper's Ferry and the Point of 
Rocks, on the Potomac; the Canal Company 
immediately stopped its work by an injunction. 
The only terms on which it agreed to permit its 
rival to build to Harper's Ferry was that a 
promise should be given that the Railroad Com- 
pany would not build any part of the road onward 
to Cumberland, Maryland, until the canal should 
have been completed to that point. 

Could it have been realized at the time, this 
blow was not wholly unfortunate. There were 
problems before this first railroad company in 
America more difficult than the gaining of a 



246 Pilots of the Republic 

right of way to Cumberland. Every feature 
of its undertaking was in most primitive condi- 
tion, — road-bed, tracks, rails, sleepers, ties, cars, 
all, were most simple. The road was an ordinary 
macadamized pathway; the cars were common 
stagecoaches, on smaller, heavier wheels. More 
than all else, the motor force was an intrinsically 
vital problem. Horses and mules were now being 
used; a car with a sail was invented, but was, of 
course, useless in calm weather, or when the wind 
was not blowing in the right direction. In the 
meantime the steam locomotive was being per- 
fected, and Peter Cooper's " Tom Thumb '* 
settled the question in 1830, on these tracks 
of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. For a 
number of years the ultimate practicability of 
the machine was in question, but when the rail- 
road was in a position to expand westward, in 
1836, the locomotive as a motor force was 
acknowledged on every hand to be a success. 
In all other departments, likewise, the railroad 
had been improving. The six years had seen a 
vast change. 



Pilots of the Republic 247 

With the canal, on the other hand, these had 
been discouraging years. Though master of 
the legal situation, money came to it slowly, 
labor became more costly, unexpected physical 
difficulties were encountered, floods delayed 
operations. Again and again aid from Mary- 
land had been invoked successfully; and now, 
in 1836, it was reported that three millions more 
was necessary to complete the canal to Cumber- 
land. Maryland now passed her famous " Eight- 
million-dollar Bill," giving the railroad and canal 
each three million dollars, with a condition im- 
posed on the Canal Company that the two com- 
panies should have an equal right of way up the 
Potomac to Cumberland. Though the directors 
of the Canal Company objected bitterly at thus 
being compelled to resign control of the situation, 
the needs of the Company were such that 
acquiescence was imperatively necessary. The 
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal was completed to 
Cumberland in 1851, at a cost of over eleven 
million dollars, the root of Maryland's great 
State debt. 



248 Pilots of the Republic 

The passage of this epoch-making law was 
the turning-point in this long and fierce conflict. 
It marked the day when the city of Baltimore 
at last conquered the State of Maryland, — when 
the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad mastered the 
situation, of which in 1832 the canal was master. 
The panic of 1837 delayed temporarily the sweep 
of the railway up the Potomac to Cumberland, 
but it reached that strategic point in 1842. Work 
on the route across the mountains was begun at 
various points, and the whole line was opened 
almost simultaneously. The first division, from 
Cumberland to Piedmont, was opened in June, 
1851 ; by the next June the road was completed 
to Fairmount on the Monongahela River; and 
on the night of January 12, 1853, a banquet- 
board was spread in the city of Wheeling to 
celebrate the completion of the Baltimore and 
Ohio Railroad to the Ohio River. Of the five 
regular toasts of the evening none was so typical 
or so welcome as that to the president under whose 
auspices this first railway had been thrown across 
the Alleghanies, — "Thomas Swann: standing 



Pilots of the Republic 249 

upon the banks of the Ohio, and looking back 
upon the mighty peaks of the Alleghanies, sur- 
mounted by his efforts, he can proudly exclaim, 
' Veni, vidi, vici.' " 

The story of the building of the Pennsylvania 
Canal, and later the Pennsylvania Railway, a 
little to the north of the two Maryland works, 
is not a story of bitter rivalry, but is remarkable 
in point of enterprise and swift success; it also 
shows another of the results of the successful 
operation of the Erie Canal. 

In 1824 the Pennsylvania Legislature author- 
ized the appointment of a commission to select 
a route for a canal from Philadelphia to Pitts- 
burg. The success of New York's canal (now 
practically completed) impressed the Pennsyl- 
vanians as forcefully as it did Mary landers and 
Virginians; Philadelphia desired to control the 
trade of the West as much as New York or 
Baltimore. The earnestness of the Pennsyl- 
vanians could not be more clearly shown than 
by the rapid building of their canal. The Chesa- 
peake and Ohio Canal up the Potomac Valley 



250 Pilots of the Republic 

was over twenty-five years in building; within 
ten years of the time the above commission was 
appointed, canal-boats could pass from Phila- 
delphia to Pittsburg. The route, at first, was 
by the Schuylkill to the Union Canal, which 
entered the Susquehanna at Middletown; this 
was nominally the eastern division of the Penn- 
sylvania Canal, it having been completed in 1827. 
The central division extended from Middletown 
(later from Columbia) up the Susquehanna and 
Juniata rivers to Hollidaysburg. This division 
was completed in 1834, at a cost of nearly five 
and one-half millions. The western division ran 
from Johnstown down the Conemaugh, Kiskim- 
inetas, and Alleghany valleys; it was completed 
to Pittsburg in 1830, at a cost of a little over 
three millions. 

As stated, canal-boats could traverse this course 
as early as 1834, and the uninformed must wonder 
how a canal-boat could vault the towering crest 
lying between Hollidaysburg and Johnstown, 
which the Pennsylvania Railway crosses with 
difficulty at Gallitzin, more than two thousand 



Pilots of the Republic 251 

feet above sea-level. The answer to this intro- 
duces us to the Alleghany Portage Railway, a 
splendid piece of early engineering, which de- 
serves mention in any sketch of early deeds of 
expansion and promotion in America. 

The feat was accomplished by means of in- 
clined planes; the idea was not at all new, but, 
under the circmnstances, it was wholly an experi- 
ment. The plan was to build a railway which 
could contain eleven sections with heavy grades, 
and between them ten inclined planes. A canal- 
boat having been run into a submerged car in 
the basin on either side of the mountain, it could 
be drawn over the level by horses or locomotives, 
and sent over the summit, 1,441 feet above HoUi- 
daysburg, on the inclines by means of stationary 
engines. The scheme was first advanced early 
in the history of the canal, but it was not finally 
adopted until 1831, and in three years the portage 
railway was opened for traffic. The ten planes 
averaged about 2,000 feet in length and about 
200 feet in elevation. They were numbered from 
west to east. Certain of the levels were quite 



252 Pilots of the Republic 

long, that between Planes No. 1 and No. 2 being 
thirteen miles in length; the total length of the 
road was thirty-six miles. It was built through 
the primeval forests, and an aisle of one hundred 
and twenty feet in width (twice as wide as that 
made for the Erie Canal) was cleared, so that the 
structure would not be in danger of the falling 
trees which were continually blocking early high- 
ways and demolishing pioneer bridges. Two 
names should be remembered in connection with 
this momentous work, — Sylvester Welch and 
Moncure Robinson, the chief and the consulting 
engineer who erected it. 

It was in October, 1834, that the first boat, the 
*' Hit or Miss " from the Lackawanna, was sent 
over the Alleghany Portage Railway intact. 
According to a local newspaper, it " rested at 
night on the top of the mountain [Blair's Gap], 
like Noah's Ark on Ararat, and descended the 
next morning into the valley of the Mississippi 
and sailed for St. Louis." Fifty years before, 
to the month, the pioneer expansionist, Washing- 
ton, was floundering along in Dunkard Bottom 



Pilots of the Republic 253 

seeking a way for a boat to do what the " Hit 
or Miss " did in those October days of 1834. It 
is a far cry, measured by hopes and dreams, back 
to Washington, but one feature of the picture 
is of great interest: in Washington's famous 
appeal to Governor Harrison in 1784 he said 
of the young West: " The Western inhabitants 
would do their part [in forming a route of com- 
munication]. . . . Weak as they are, they would 
meet us halfway." What a splendid comment 
on Washington's wisdom and foresight it is to 
record that the ten stationary engines on the 
Alleghany Portage Railway, which hauled the 
first load of freight that ever crossed the crest 
of the Alleghanies by artificial means, were made 
in the young West, in Pittsburg! The West 
was certainly ready to meet the East halfway 
when their union was to be perfected. 

But no sooner was the Pennsylvania Canal in 
working order than the success of railways was 
conceded on every hand. At first the eastern 
section of the canal was superseded by the 
Philadelphia and Columbia Railway, a portage 



254 Pilots of the Rejmblic 

railway from the Schuylkill to the Susquehanna. 
Then, in 1846 the Pennsylvania Raih-oad Com- 
pany was organized. The old route was found 
to be the best. The advance was rapid. In two 
years the road was open to Lewisburg in the 
Juniata Valley ; the western division from Pitts- 
burg to Johnstown was also built rapidly, and 
in 1852 conmiunication was possible between 
Pittsburg and Philadelphia, the Alleghany 
Portage Railway still serving to connect Holli- 
daysburg and Johnstown. In 1854 this cumber- 
some method was superseded by the railway over 
the mountain by way of Gallitzin. 

The Pennsylvania Canal, instead of delaying 
the Pennsylvania Road, assisted it, for the latter 
was encouraged by the State, and the State 
owned the canal. In 1857 the railway bought 
both the canal and its portage railway. The 
latter was closed almost immediately; the canal 
has been operated by a separate company under 
the direction of the Pennsylvania Railroad. But 
the whole , western division from Pittsburg to 
Johnstown was closed in 1864, and the portion 



Pilots of the Republic 255 

in the Juniata Valley was abandoned in 1899, 
and that in the Susquehanna Valley in 1900. 

Two magnificent railways, standing prominent 
among the great railways of the world, have 
succeeded the old canals and that old-time Alle- 
ghany Portage Railway. But these great suc- 
cesses are not their richest possessions; they 
still own, we may well believe, that spirit which 
wrought success out of difficulty, — the persist- 
ent, irresistible ambition to better present con- 
ditions and overcome present difficulties, which 
is the very essence of American genius and the 
great secret of America's progress. If you 
wish a painting that will portray the secret of 
America's marvellous growth, ask that the artist's 
brush draw Philip Evan Thomas in his bank 
office at Baltimore, struggling with the problem 
how his city could retain the trade of the West; 
or draw Sylvester Welch struggling with his 
plans for the inclined planes of the Alleghany 
Portage Railway. There, in those eager, un- 
satisfied, and hopeful men, you will find the 
typical American. 



CHAPTER X 

Ignorance of the American People regarding the Territory 
called New France and that called Louisiana. — Civili- 
zations Cruel March into Louisiana. — Lewis and Clark, 
Leaders of the Expedition to the Far West, already 
Trained Soldiers. — Its Aim not Conquest, but the Ad- 
vancement of Knowledge arid Trade. — Some Previous 
Explorers. — The Make-up of Lewis and Clark'' s Party. 

— Fitness of the Leaders for the Work. — The Winter 
o/" 1804-1 805 spent at Fort Mandan. — First Encounter 
with the Grizzly Bear. — Portage from the Missouri to 
the Columbia, 340 Miles. — Down the Columbia to the 
Coast near Point Adams. — The Return Journey begun, 
March, 1806. — British Traders blamed for the Indians'' 
Hatred of Americans. — The Americans thu^ driven to 
Deeds which made them despised by the British. — Ar- 
rival of the Explorer's at St. Louis. — News of this 
Exploration starts the Rush of Emigrants to the West. 

— Zebulon M. Pike''s Ascent of the Mississippi, 1 805. 

— He explores the Leech Lake Region. — Ordered to the 
Far West, he reaches the Republican and Arkansas 
Rivers. — Sufferings of his Party travelling toward the 
Rio Grande. — He sets up the A merican Flag on Span- 
ish Territory and is sent away. — The West regarded 
as the Home of Patriotism. 



CHAPTER X 

LEWIS AND CLARK: EXPLORERS OF LOUISIANA 



HEN the vast 
region known as 
Louisiana was 
purchased by- 
President Jef- 
ferson, a cen- 
tury ago, the 
American peo- 
ple knew as 
little about it as 
the American 
colonies knew 
about the great 
territory called New France which came under 
English sovereignty at the end of the French 
War, fifty years earlier. But however great 
Louisiana was, and whatever its splendid stretch 




260 Pilots of the Republic 

of gleaming waterway or rugged mountain 
range, it was sure that the race which now became 
its master would not shirk from solving the tre- 
mendous problems of its destiny. In 1763 the 
same race had taken quiet possession of New 
France, including the whole empire of the Great 
Lakes and all the eastern tributaries of the Mis- 
sissippi River; in the half -century since that 
day this race had proved its vital powers of suc- 
cessful exploitation of new countries. In those 
fifty years a Tennessee, a Kentucky, an Ohio, 
and an Indiana and Illinois had sprung up out 
of an unknown wilderness as if a magician's 
wand had touched, one by one, the falling petals 
of its buckeye blossoms. Thus, New France had 
been acquired by a great kingdom, but the power 
of assimilation lay in the genius of the common 
people of England's seaboard colonies for home- 
building and land-clearing. Soon the era of 
brutal individualism passed from the Middle 
West and the old Northwest; weak as it was, 
the young American Republic, in the person of 
such men as Richard Henderson and Rufus 



Pilots of the Republic 261 

Putnam, threw an arm about the wilderness, 
while George Rogers Clark, " Mad Anthony " 
Wayne, and William Henry Harrison settled 
the question of sovereignty with the red-skinned 
inliabitants of the land. 

Civilization often marched rough-shod into 
the American Middle West, bringing, however, 
better days and ideals than those which it 
harshly crushed. After Anthony Wayne's con- 
quest of Northwestern Indiana at Fallen Timber 
(near Toledo, Ohio) in 1794 the burst of popu- 
lation westward from Pittsburg and Kentucky 
to the valley of the Mississippi was marvellous; 
by the time of the purchase of Louisiana in 
1803 the rough vanguard of the race which had 
so swiftly opened Kentucky and Ohio and Ten- 
nessee to the world was crowding the banks of 
the Mississippi, ready to leap forward to even 
greater conquests. What these irrepressible 
pioneers had done they could do again. Those 
who affirmed that the purchase of Louisiana 
must prove a failure had counted without their 
host. 



262 Pilots of the Republic 

Nothing is of more interest in the great Gov- 
ernment expedition of exploration which Presi- 
dent Jefferson now sent into the unknown 
territory beyond the Mississippi than this very 
fact of vital connection between the leaders of 
the former movement into the eastern half of the 
Mississippi Basin and this present movement 
into its tremendous western half. In a previous 
story we have shown that the founders of the 
old Northwest were largely heroes of the French 
and Indian and the Revolutionary wars; it is 
now interesting indeed to note that these leaders 
in Far Western exploration — Meriwether Lewis 
and William Clark — were in turn heroes of 
the British and Indian wars, both of them sur- 
\dvors of bloody Fallen Timber, where, on the 
cyclone's path, Anthony Wayne's hard-trained 
soldiers made sure that Indian hostility was 
never again to be a national menace on the 
American continent. 

The proposed exploration of Louisiana by 
Lewis and Clark is interesting also as the 
first scientific expedition ever promoted by the 




Meriwether Lewis 
Of the Lewis and Clark Expedition 



Pilots of the Republic 263 

American Government. For it was a tour of 
exploration only; the party did not carry leaden 
plates such as Celoron de Bienville brought fifty 
years back in those days of gold interwoven with 
purple, to bury along the tributaries of the Ohio 
as a claim to land for his royal master and the 
mistresses of France. There was here no ques- 
tion of possession ; Lewis and Clark were, on the 
contrarj^, to report on the geography, physiog- 
raphy, and zoolog}^ of the land, designate proper 
sites for trading stations, and give an account 
of the Indian nations. It is remarkable that 
little was known of Louisiana on these heads. 
Of course the continent had been crossed, 
though not by way of the JNIissouri River route, 
which had become the great highw^ay for the 
fur trade. ^Mackenzie had crossed the continent 
in the Far North, and Hearne had passed over 
the Barren Grounds just under the Ai'ctic Circle. 
To the southward from the IMissouri the Span- 
iards had run to and from the Pacific for two 
centuries. The commanding position of St. 
Louis showed that the Missouri route was of 



264 Pilots of the Reimhlic 

utmost importance; the portage to the half- 
known Columbia was of strategic value, and a 
knowledge of that river indispensable to sane 
plans, commercial and political, in the future. 

In May, 1804, the explorers were ready to 
start from St. Louis. They numbered twenty- 
seven men and the two leading spirits, Lewis and 
Clark; fourteen of the number were regular 
soldiers from the United States army; there 
were nine adventurous volunteers from Ken- 
tucky; a half-breed interpreter; two French 
voj^ageurs and Clark's negro servant completed 
the roster. The party was increased by the 
addition of sixteen men, soldiers and traders, 
whose destination was the Mandan villages on 
the Missouri, where the explorers proposed to 
spend the first Winter. 

There is something of the simplicity of real 
grandeur in the commonplace records of the 
leaders of this expedition. " They were men 
with no pretensions to scientific learning," writes 
Roosevelt, " but they were singularly close and 
accurate observers and truthful narrators. Very 



Pilots of the Republic 265 

rarely have any similar explorers described so 
faithfully not only the physical features, but the 
animals and plants of a newly discovered land. 
. . . Few explorers who did and saw so much 
that was absolutely new have written of their 
deeds with such quiet absence of boastfulness, 
and have drawn their descriptions with such 
complete freedom from exaggeration." 

The verj^ absence of incident in the story is 
significant to one who remembers the countless 
dangers that beset Lewis and Clark as they 
fared slowly on up the long, tiresome stretches 
of the Missouri; surprises, accidents, misunder- 
standings, miscalculations, and mutinies might 
have been the order of the day; a dozen in- 
stances could be cited of parties making jour- 
neys far less in extent than that now under 
consideration where the infelicities of a single 
week surpassed those known throughout those 
three years. These splendid qualities, which can 
hardly be emphasized save in a negative way, 
make this expedition as singular as it was aus- 
picious in our national annals. Good discipline 



266 Pilots of the Republic 

was kept without engendering hatred ; the leaders 
worked faithfully with their men at the hardest 
and most menial tasks; in suffering, risking, 
laboring, they set examples to all of their party. 
In dealing with the Indians good judgment was 
used; even in the land of the fierce Dakotas 
they escaped harm because of great diplomacy, 
presenting a more bold and haughty front than 
could perhaps have been maintained if once it 
had been challenged. With all Indian nations 
conferences were held, at which the purchase of 
Louisiana from France was officially announced, 
and proper presents were distributed in sign of 
the friendship of the United States. 

The Winter of 1804-1805 was spent at Fort 
Mandan, on the Missouri River, sixteen hundred 
miles from its junction with the Mississippi. In 
the Spring the party, now thirty-two strong, 
pressed on up the INIissouri, which now turned in a 
decidedly westward direction. Between the Little 
Missouri and the upper waters of the JNIissouri 
proper, game was found in very great quantities, 
this region having been famous in that respect 



Pilots of the Republic 267 

until the present generation. One game animal 
with which white men had not been acquainted 
was now encountered, — the grizzly bear. Bears 
in the Middle West were, under ordinary cir- 
cumstances, of no danger; these grizzlies of the 
upper Missouri were very bold and dangerous. 
Few Indians were encountered on the upper 
Missouri, Fall had come ere the party had 
reached the difficult portage from the Missouri 
to the Columbia; the distance from the Missis- 
sippi to the Falls of the Missouri, at the mouth 
of the Portage River, the point near which the 
land journey began, was 2,575 miles. The Por- 
tage to the Columbia was 340 miles in length. 
Having obtained horses from the Shoshones, the 
Indians on the portage, the explorers accom- 
plished the hard journey through the Bitter Root 
Mountains. 

The strange white men were received not 
unkindly by the not less strange Indians of the 
great Columbia Valley, though it needed a bold 
demeanor, in some instances, to maintain the 
ground gained. Yet on the men went down the 



268 Pilots of the Republic 

river and encamped for the Winter on the coast 
near Point Adams, — the end of a journey of 
over four thousand miles. Here the brave Cap- 
tain Gray of Boston, thirteen years before, had 
discovered the mouth of the Columbia and given 
the river the name of his good ship. The Winter 
was spent hereabouts, the explorers suffering 
somewhat for lack of food until they learned to 
relish dog-flesh, the taste for which had to be 
acquired. By March, 1806, they were ready to 
pull up stakes and begin the long homeward 
journey. 

This was almost as barren of adventure as the 
outward passage, though a savage attack by a 
handful of Blackf eet, — henceforward to be the 
bitter foes of Rocky Mountain traders and pio- 
neers, — and the accidental wounding of Lewis 
by one of his party, were unpleasant interrup- 
tions in the monotony of the steady marching, 
paddling, and hunting. It is remarkable that, 
throughout the western expansion of the United 
States after the Revolution, our northern pio- 
neers from Pennsylvania to Oregon should have 



Pilots of the Republic 269 

felt — in many cases bitterly — the tricky, in- 
sulting hatred of British traders and their Indian 
allies. As Washington in 1790 laid at the door 
of British instigators the cause of the long war 
ended by Wayne at Fallen Timber, so, all the 
way across the continent our pioneers had to 
contend with the same despicable influence, and 
were driven by it to deeds which made them, in 
turn, equally despised by their northern rivals. 
" I was in hopes," wrote an early pioneer, " that 
the British Indian traders had some bounds to 
their rapacity . . . that they were completely 
saturated with our blood. But it appears not to 
have been the case. Like a greedy wolf, not 
satisfied with the flesh, they quarrelled over the 
bones. . . . Alarmed at the individual enterprise 
of our people . . . they furnished [the Indians] 
with . , . the instruments of death and a pass- 
port [horses] to our bosom." Even at the very 
beginning these first Americans on the Columbia 
and the Bitter Root range had a taste of Indian 
hatred from both the Blackf eet and the Crows. 
On the way back to the JMandan villages the 



270 Pilots of the Republic 

explorers had an experience which was by no 
means insignificant. As they were dropping 
down the upper Missouri, one day two men came 
into view; they proved to be American hunters, 
Dickson and Hancock by name, from Ilhnois. 
They had been plundered by the fierce Sioux, 
and one of them had been wounded; it can be 
imagined how glad they were to fall in with 
a party large enough to ward off the insults 
of the Sioux. The hunters did remain with 
Lewis and Clark until the Mandan villages were 
reached, but no longer. Obtaining a fresh start, 
the two turned back toward the Rockies, and 
one of Lewis and Clark's own soldiers, Colter 
(later the Yellowstone pioneer), went back with 
them. These three led the van of all the pioneer 
host under whose feet the western half of the 
continent was soon to tremble. 

Holding the Sioux safely at bay during the 
passage down the Missouri, Lewis and Clark in 
September were once again on the straggling 
streets of the little village of St. Louis, then 
numbering perhaps a thousand inhabitants. 



Pilots of the Republic 271 

From any standpoint this expedition must rank 
high among the tours of the world's greatest 
explorers; a way to the Pacific through Louis- 
iana, which had just been purchased, was now 
assured. Knowing as we do so well to-day of 
Russia's determined effort to secure an outlet 
for her Asiatic pioneers and commerce on the 
Pacific Ocean, we can realize better the national 
import of Lewis's message to President Jeffer- 
son giving assurance that there was a practicable 
route from the Mississippi Basin to the Pacific by 
way of the tumbling Columbia. Without guides, 
save what could be picked up on the way, these 
men had crossed the continent; and as the story 
told by returning Kentucky hunters to wondering 
pioneers in their Alleghany cabins set on foot the 
first great burst of immigration across the AUe- 
ghanies into the Ohio Basin, so in turn the story 
of Lewis and Clark and Gass and the others set 
on foot the movement which resulted in the entire 
conquest of the Rockies and the Great West. 

But as the stories of others besides Kentuck- 
ians played a part in the vaulting of the first 



272 Pilots of the Republic 

great America " divide," so, too, others besides 
Lewis and Clark influenced the early movement 
into the Farthest West. One of these, who 
stands closest to the heroes of the Missouri and 
Columbia, was Zebulon M. Pike, a son of a 
Revolutionary officer from New Jersey, the 
State from which the pioneers of Cincinnati and 
southwestern Ohio had come. During Lewis 
and Clark's adventure this hardy explorer as- 
cended the Mississippi, August, 1805, in a keel- 
boat, with twenty regular soldiers. The Indians 
of the Minnesota country were not openly hos- 
tile, but their conduct was anything but friendly. 
The Winter was spent at the beautiful Falls of 
St. Anthony, at Minneapolis. Pike explored the 
Leech Lake region but did not reach Lake 
Itasca. He found the British flag floating 
over certain small forts built by British traders, 
which he in every case ordered down. An 
American flag was raised in each instance, and 
the news of the Louisiana purchase was noised 
abroad. The British traders treated Pike's band 
with all the kindness and respect that their 



Pilots of the Republic 273 

well-armed condition demanded. The expedi- 
tion came down the Mississippi in April, 1806, 
to St. Louis. 

There were other regions, how^ever, in Louisi- 
ana where the United States flag ought to go 
now, and General Wilkinson, who had sent Pike 
to the North, now ordered him into the Far 
West. Pike's route was up the Osage and over- 
land to the Pawnee Republic on Republican 
River. His party numbered twenty-three, and 
with him went fifty Osages, mostly women and 
children, who had been captured in savage war 
by the Pottawattomies. The diplomatic return 
of these forlorn captives of course determined 
the attitude of the Osage nation toward Pike's 
company and his claims of American sover- 
eignty over the land. And it was time for 
America to extend her claim and make it good. 
Already a Spanish expedition had passed along 
the frontier distributing bright Spanish flags 
and warning the Indians that the Spanish boast 
of possession was still good and would be made 
better. Pike travelled in the wak^ of this band 

18 



274 Pilots of the Republic 

of interlopers, neutralizing the effect of its influ- 
ence and raising the American flag everywhere 
in place of the Spanish. 

Reaching the Arkansas, Pike ascended that 
river late in the Fall, and when Winter set in the 
brave band was half lost in the mountains near 
the towering peak which was forever to stand a 
dazzling monument to the hardihood and reso- 
lution of its leader. At the opening of the new 
year, near Canyon City, where deer were found 
wintering, a log fort was built in which a por- 
tion of the party remained with the pack animals, 
while Pike with twelve soldiers essayed the des- 
perate journey to the Rio Grande. 

" Their sufferings were terrible. They were almost 
starved, and so cold was the weather that at one time 
no less than nine of the men froze their feet. ... In 
the Wet Mountain Valley, which they reached in mid- 
January, . . . starvation stared them in the face. 
There had been a heavy snow-storm; no game was to 
be seen; and they had been two days without food. 
The men with frozen feet, exhausted by hunger, could 
no longer travel. Two of the soldiers went out to hunt 




William Clark 
Of the Lewis and Clark Expedition 



Pilots of tJie Republic 275 

but got nothing. At the same time Pike [and a com- 
rade] . . . started, determined not to return at all 
unless they could bring back meat. Pike wrote that 
they had resolved to stay out and die by themselves, 
rather than to go back to camp ' and behold the misery 
of our poor lads.' All day they tramped wearily 
through the heavy snow. Towards evening they came 
on a buffalo, and wounded it ; but faint and weak from 
hunger, they shot badly, and the buffalo escaped ; a 
disappointment literally as bitter as death. That night 
they sat up among some rocks, all night long, unable 
to sleep because of the intense cold, shivering in their 
thin rags ; they had not eaten for three days. But 
. . . they at last succeeded, after another heart- 
breaking failure, in killing a buffalo. At midnight 
they staggered into camp with the meat, and all the 
party broke their four days' fast." ^ 

Pike at length succeeded in his design of 
reaching the Rio Grande, and here he built a 
fort and threw out to the breeze an American 
flag, though knowing well that he was on Span- 
ish territory now. The Louisiana boundary was 
ill defined, but in a general way it ran up the 

1 Theodore Roosevelt, " The Winning of the West," IV, 33T, 338. 



276 Pilots of the Republic 

Red River, passed a hundred miles northeast of 
Santa Fe and just north of Salt Lake, thence 
it struck straight west to the Pacific. By any 
interpretation the Rio Grande was south of the 
line. The Spaniards, who came suddenly upon 
the scene, diplomatically assumed that the daring 
explorer had lost his way; he suffered nothing 
from their hands, and was sent home through 
Chihuahua and Texas. 

All the hopes of the purchasers of Old Louisi- 
ana and of its flag-planters have come true, and, 
with them, dreams the most feverish brain of 
that day ccxild not fashion. History has repeated 
itself significantly as our standard-bearers have 
gone westward. When the old Northwest was 
carved out of a wilderness, there was no fear in 
the hearts of our forefathers that was not felt 
when Louisiana was purchased. The great fear 
in each case was the same — the British at the 
north and the Spaniard at the south. And in 
each case the leaven of the East was potent to 
leaven the whole lump. Great responsibilities 
steady nations as well as men; the very fact of 



Pilots of the Republic 277 

a spreading frontier and a widening sphere of 
influence — bringing alarm to some and fear to 
many — was of appealing force throughout a 
century to the conscience and honor of American 
statesmen. As, in the dark days of the Revolu- 
tion, the wary Washington determined, in case 
of defeat, to lead the fragment of his armies 
across the Alleghanies and fight the battles over 
again in the Ohio Basin, where he knew the pio- 
neers would forever keep pure the spirit of inde- 
pendence, so men in later years have looked 
confidently to the Greater West, to the Missis- 
sippi Basin and old Louisiana, for as pure a 
patriotism (though it might appear at times in 
a rough guise) as ever was breathed at Plymouth 
Rock. 



CHAPTER XI 

Fur Trade the Leading Business in the Northwest. — Rise 
of the Astor Family. — The U. S. Government fails as 
a Rival of the Northwest Company of Montreal, in the 
Fur Trade. — John Jacob Astor sees the Possibilities of 
the American Fur Trade. — He ships Furs from 
Montreal to London. — Irving' s Opinion of Astor. — 
Astor plans to establish a Line of Trading-posts up the 
Missouri and down the Columbia. — The Scheme a 
Failure, but indirectly Valuable. — Astor''s Enterprise 
helpful toward the Americanization of Louisiana. — He 
establishes the Pacific Fur Company, 1810. — Thi^ 
Company and the Northwest Company both seeking to 
occupy the Mouth of the Columbia ; the Former arrives 
First. — In the War o/" 1812 the British take Possession 
of the Place. — Benefits to America from Astor'' s Ex- 
ample. — Like him, some Other Promoters failed to 
achieve the Particular Ends iji View. 



CHAPTER XI 



ASTOR: THE PROMOTER OF ASTORIA 

HE brave ex- 
plorations of 
Lewis and 
Clark and Pike 
opened up the 
vast Territory 
of Louisiana 
for occupation 
and commerce. 
The one great 
business in the 
Northwest had 
been the fur 
trade, and for a long period it was yet to be the 
absorbing theme of promoters and capitalists, 
the source of great rivalries, great disappoint- 
ments, and great fortunes. 




282 Pilots of the Republic 

No story of American promotion is more 
unique than that of the rise of the Astor family 
from obscurity to a position of power and use- 
fuhiess, and this story has its early setting in 
the fur-trading camps of the Far Northwest, 
where Astoria arose beside the Pacific Sea. The 
tale is most typically American: Its hero, John 
Jacob Astor, was of foreign parentage ; he came 
to America poor; he seized upon an opening 
which others had passed over; he had the sup- 
port of a self-confidence that was not blind; he 
fought undauntedly all obstacles and scorned all 

rivalry; and at last he secured America's first 

; princely fortune. 

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century 
the fur trade of the Northwest was in the hands 
of the powerful Northwest Company of Mon- 
treal, a race of merchant princes about whose 
exploits such a true and brilliant sheen of ro- 
mance has been thrown. But the United States 
Government was not content that Canadian 
princes alone should get possession of the wealth 
of the Northern forests, and as early as 1796 it 



Pilots of the Republic 283 

sent agents westward to meet the Indians and 
to erect trading-houses. The plan was a failure, 
as any plan must have been " where the dull 
patronage of Government is counted upon to 
outvie the keen activity of private enterprise." 
In almost every one of our preceding stories of 
America's captains of expansion, save that of 
the Lewis and Clark expedition only, a private 
enterprise has been our study, and each story has 
been woven around a personality. Even in the 
case of the exception noted, it was the personal 
interest and daring of Lewis and Clark that 
made their splendid tour a success, though it was 
promoted bj'^ the Government. 

The quiet little village of Waldorf near Hei- 
delberg, Germany, was the birthplace of John 
Jacob Astor, and the name is preserved to-day 
in the princely splendor of the Waldorf-Astoria 
Hotel. The young man, who never believed 
that he would become a merchant prince, spent 
his first years in the most rural simplicity. It 
is marvellous how America has imperiously called 
upon so many distant heaths for men with a 



284 Pilots of the Republic 

genius for hard work and for daring dreams; 
it called St. Clair from Scotland, Zeisberger 
from Moravia, and Gallatin and Bouquet from 
Switzerland; and now a German peasant boy, 
inheriting blood and fibre, felt early in his veins 
this same mystic call, and saw visions of a future 
possible only in a great and free land. At an 
early age he went to London, where he remained 
in an elder brother's employ until the close of 
the Revolutionary War; now, in 1783, at twenty 
years of age, he left London for America with 
a small stock of musical instruments with which 
his brother had supphed him. At this time one 
of those strange providential miracles in human 
lives occurred in the life of this lad, who himself 
had had a large faith since childhood days; by 
mere chance, on the ocean voyage, or in the ice- 
jam at Hampton Roads, his mind was directed 
to the great West and its fur trade. From just 
what point the leading came strongest is not of 
great importance, but the fact remains that upon 
his arrival at New York young Astor disposed of 
his musical instruments and hastened back to 



Pilots of the Republic 285 

London with a consignment of furs. The tran- 
saction proved profitable, and the youth turned 
all his energies to the problem of the fur trade. 
He studied the British market, and went to the 
continent of Europe and surveyed conditions 
there. He returned to New York and began in 
the humblest way to found his great house. All 
imaginable difficulties were encountered; the fur 
trade had been confined almost wholly to the 
Canadian companies, who brooked no competi- 
tion ; in the Atlantic States it had been compara- 
tively unimportant and insignificant. At the 
close of the war of separation England had re- 
fused to give up many of her important posts on 
the American side of the Great Lakes, — a gall- 
ing hindrance to all who sought to interest them- 
selves in the fur trade. Again, the importation 
of furs from Canada to the United States was 
prohibited. The young merchant soon began 
making trips to Montreal, at which point he pur- 
chased furs and shipped them direct to London. 

In this fight for position and power young 
Astor showed plainly the great characteristics 



286 Pilots of the Republic 

of the successful merchant, — earnestness and 
faith. He showed, too, some of the rashness of 
genius, which at times is called insanity; but 
search in the biographies of our great Americans, 
and how many will you find who did not early 
in their careers have some inkling of their great 
successes, — some whisper of fortune which rang 
in the young heart ? The successes of John Jacob 
Astor were not greater than some of his day- 
dreams. " I '11 build one day or other," he once 
said to himself on Broadway, " a greater house 
than any of these, in this very street." Irving 
writes of Astor: 

" He began his career, of course, on the narrowest 
scale; but he brought to the task a persevering in- 
dustry, rigid economy, and strict integrity. To these 
were added an inspiring spirit that always looked up- 
ward ; a genius, bold, fertile, and expansive ; a sagacity 
quick to grasp and convert every circumstance to its ad- 
vantage ; and a singular and never-wavering confidence 
of signal success." 

It was the reports of Lewis and Clark that 
inspired Astor in his daring dream of securing 



Pilots of the Bepuhlic 287 

a commercial control of the great Northwest 
which, by the help and protection of the American 
Government, would give impetus to the expansion 
of the American people into a great empire. The 
key to Astor's plan was to open an avenue of 
intercourse between the Atlantic and Pacific 
oceans and form regular establishments or settle- 
ments across the continent from one headquarters 
on the Atlantic to another on the Pacific. Sir 
Alexander Mackenzie had conceived this idea in 
1793, but it involved such herculean labors that 
it was not attempted; the business sinews of the 
Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Com- 
pany were so strong, and their long-cherished 
jealousies were so deep-rooted, that Mackenzie's 
plan of coalescence was impossible. In the mean- 
time Lewis and Clark had found a route through 
Louisiana to the Pacific, and Captain Gray of 
Boston had anchored in the mouth of the Colum- 
bia. By land and water the objective point had 
been reached, and Astor entered upon the great 
task of his life with ardor and enthusiasm. The 
very obstacles in his way seemed to augment his 



288 Pilots of the Republic 

courage, and every repulse fired him to increased 
exertion. 

It is a remarkable fact that at this time the 
principal market for American furs was in 
China. The British Government had awarded 
the monopoly of the China trade to the powerful 
East India Company, and neither the Hudson 
Bay Company nor the Northwest Company was 
allowed to ship furs westward across the Pacific 
to China. Astor planned to take full advantage 
of this ridiculous handicap under which the Cana- 
dian fur companies labored. He planned to erect 
a line of trading posts up the Missouri and down 
the Columbia, at whose mouth a great emporium 
was to be established ; and to this the lesser posts 
which were to be located in the interior would all 
be tributary. A coastwise trade would be ^Bstab- 
lished, with the Columbia post as headquarters. 
Each year a ship was to be sent from New York 
to the Columbia, loaded with reenforcements and 
supplies. Upon unloading, this ship was to take 
the year's receipt of furs and sail to Canton, trad- 
ing off its rich cargo there for merchandise; the 




John Jacob Astor 
Founder of Astoria 



Pilots of the Republic 289 

voyage was to be continued to New York, where 
the Chinese cargo was to be turned into money. 

It is not because of the success of this intrepid 
promoter that the founding of Astoria occupies 
such a unique position among the great exploits 
in the history of American expansion. His at- 
tempt to secure the fur trade was not a success; 
but, considering the day in which it was conceived, 
the tremendous difficulties to be overcome, the 
rivalry of British and Russian promoters in the 
North and Northwest, and the inability of others 
to achieve it, the founding of Astoria on the 
Columbia must be considered typically American 
in the optimism of its conception and the daring 
of its accomplishment. If there is a good sense 
in which the words can be used, America has been 
made by a race of gamblers the like of which the 
world has never seen before. We have risked 
our money as no race risked money before 
our day. Astor was perhaps the first great 
"plunger" of America; his enthusiasm carried 
everything before it and influenced the spread 
of American rights and interests. The failure 

19 



290 Pilots of the Republic 

of the Astoria scheme did not check certain more 
fundamental movements toward the Pacific; the 
questions of boundaries and territorial and inter- 
national rights were brought to the fore because 
of Astor's attempt. This promoter's lifelong 
enterprise was a highly important step, after the 
Lewis and Clark expedition, toward the Ameri- 
canization of the newly purchased Louisiana; it 
hastened the settlement of questions which had 
to be faced and solved before Louisiana was ours 
in fact as well as on paper. Lewis and Clark 
found a way thither and announced to the Indian 
nations American possession; Astor, by means 
of a private enterprise, precipitated the questions 
of boundaries and rights which America and 
England must have settled sooner or later. 

One of the first interesting developments of 
an international nature followed close upon a 
diplomatic manoeu^a'e by which Astor attempted 
to thwart rivalry by seeking to have the North- 
west Company become interested to the extent 
of a one-third share in his American company. 
The wily Canadians delayed their decision, and 



Pilots of the Republic 291 

at last answered by attempting to secure the 
mouth of the Columbia before Astor's party 
could reach the spot. Astor pushed straight 
ahead, however, and on June 23, 1810, the Pacific 
Fur Company was organized, with Mr. Astor, 
Duncan McDougal, Donald McKenzie, and 
Wilson Price Hunt as chief operators. 

The stock in this newly formed company was 
to be divided into one hundred equal shares, fifty 
of which were to be at the disposal of Mr. Astor, 
the remaining fifty to be divided among the part- 
ners and associates. Mr. Astor was immediately 
placed at the head of the Company, to manage 
its business in New York. He was to furnish all 
vessels, provisions, ammunition, goods, arms, and 
all requisites for the enterprise, provided they did 
not involve a greater advance than four hundred 
thousand dollars. To Mr. Astor was given the 
privilege of introducing other persons into the 
Company as partners. None of them should be 
entitled to more than two shares, and two, at 
least, must be conversant with the Indian trade. 
Annually a general meeting of the Company 



292 Pilots of the Republic 

was to be held at the Columbia River, at which 
absent members might be represented and, under 
certain specified conditions, might vote by proxy. 
The association was to continue twenty years if 
successful; should it be found unprofitable, how- 
ever, the parties concerned had full power to dis- 
solve it at the end of the first five years. For this 
trial period of five years Mr. Astor volunteered 
to bear all losses incurred, after which they were 
to be borne by the partners proportionally to the 
number of shares they held. Wilson Price Hunt 
was chosen to act as agent for the Company for 
a term of five years. He was to reside at the 
principal establishment on the West coast ; should 
the interests of the association at any time require 
his absence from this post, a person was to be 
appointed in general meeting to take his place. 

The two campaigns now inaugurated, one by 
land and one by sea, aimed at the coveted point 
on the Pacific Coast. The " Tonquin " was fitted 
out in September, 1810, and sent under Captain 
Thorn around Cape Horn, and Hunt was sent 
from Montreal with the land expedition. The 



Pilots of the Republic 293 

" Tonquin " arrived at the mouth of the Colum- 
bia March 22, 1811, and on April 12 the little 
settlement, appropriately named Astoria, was 
founded on Point George. In the race for 
the Columbia the Americans had beaten the 
Canadians. 

Hunt had gone to Montreal in July, 1810, 
and, setting out from that point by way of the 
Ottawa, reached Mackinaw July 22. Having 
remained at this point nearly three weeks, he 
reached St. Louis by way of the Green Bay route 
on September 3. The party was not on its way 
again until October 21, and it wintered at the 
mouth of the Nodowa on the Missouri, four hun- 
dred and fifty miles from its mouth. Proceeding 
westward in April, the party gained the Colum- 
bia on the 21st of January, 1812, after a terrible 
journey, and on the fifteenth of February 
Astoria was reached. 

Astor's great plan was now well under way 
toward successful operation; the promoter could 
not know for many days the fate of either 
the " Tonquin " or the overland expedition. But 



294 Pilots of the Republic 

his resolute persistence never wavered; he fitted 
out a second ship, the " Beaver," which sailed 
October 10, 1811, for the Sandwich Islands and 
the Columbia. The months dragged on; there 
came no word from the " Tonquin " ; no word 
from Hunt or Astoria; no word from the 
" Beaver " ; thousands of dollars had been in- 
vested, and no hint was received concerning its 
safety, to say nothing of profit. Rumors of the 
hostility of the Northwest Company were circu- 
lated, and of their appeal to the British Govern- 
ment, protesting against the operation of this 
American fur company. 

Then came the War of 1812, and the darkest 
days for the promoter of Astoria. In 1813, 
despite the lack of all good news, Astor fitted 
out a third ship, and the " Lark " sailed from 
New York March 6, 1813. The ship had been 
gone only two weeks when news came justifying 
Astor's fears for the safety of his Pacific colony. 
A second appeal of the Northwest Company to 
the British Government had gained the ear of 
the ministry, and a frigate was ordered to the 



Pilots of the Republic 295 

mouth of the Columbia to destroy any American 
settlement there and raise the British flag over 
the ruins. Astor appealed to the American Gov- 
ernment for assistance; the frigate "Adams" 
was detailed to protect American interests on 
the Pacific. Astor fitted out a fourth ship, the 
" Enterprise," which was to accompany the 
" Adams." Now by way of St. Louis came 
the news of the safe arrival of both Hunt and 
the " Beaver " at Astoria, and of the successful 
formation of that settlement. Hope was high, 
and Astor said, " I felt ready to fall upon my 
knees in a transport of gratitude." Dark news 
came quickly upon the heels of the good. The 
crew of the " Adams " was needed on the Great 
Lakes, and the ship could not go to the Pacific. 
Astor's hopes fell, but he determined to send the 
" Enterprise " alone. Then the British blockaded 
New York, and the last hope of giving help to 
Astoria was lost. By the " Lark " Astor sent 
directions to Hunt to guard against British sur- 
prise. " Were I on the spot," he wrote with fire, 
" and had the management of affairs, I would 



296 Pilots of the Republic 

defy them all; but, as it is, everything- depends 
upon you and your friends about you. Our 
enterprise is grand, and deserves success, and 
I hope in God it will meet it. If my object was 
merely gain of money, I should say, ' Think 
whether it is best to save what we can, and 
abandon the place; but the very idea is like a 
dagger to my heart.' " 

The fate of Astoria is well known; McDougal, 
Astor's agent, fearing the arrival of a British 
man-of-war, capitulated, on poor financial terms, 
to agents of the Northwest Company, which 
was in occupation when the British sloop-of- 
war " Raccoon " arrived, November 30. On 
December 12 Captain Block with his officers 
entered the fort, and, breaking a bottle of wine, 
took possession in the name of his Britannic 
Majesty. 

The failure of Astoria did not by any means 
ruin its sturdy promoter, though it meant a great 
monetary loss. Astor's fortune kept swelling 
with the years until it reached twenty millions; 
portions of it are of daily benefit to many 



Pilots of the Republic 297 

thousands of his countrymen in such public gifts 
as the Astor Library. 

But these material benefits never did a greater 
good than the influence Astor exerted in turning 
the minds and hearts of men to the Northwest. 
In many of our stories of early American pro- 
motion the particular end in view was never 
achieved. No hope of Washington's (after his 
desire for independence) was more vital than his 
hope of a canal between the Potomac and the 
Ohio. The plan was not realized, yet through 
his hoping for it and advocating it both the East 
and the West received lasting benefits. But of 
the stories of broken dreams, that of Astoria 
stands alone and in many ways unsurpassed. 
The indomitable spirit which Astor showed has 
been the making of America. The risks he ran 
fired him to heartier endeavor, as similar risks 
have incited hundreds of American promoters 
since his day ; he stands, in failure and in success, 
as the early type of the American promoter and 
successful merchant prince. 



CHAPTER XII 

Seeds of Christianity sown among the Indians hy the Lewis 
and ClarJc Band. — A Depidation of Nez Perces to Gen- 
eral Clark, requesting that the Bible he taught in their 
Nation. — The Methodists establish a Mission on the 
Willamette, but pass by the Nez Perces. — Interest in 
the New Field for Explorers and Missionaries is now 
awakened. — Marcus Whitman suited by Early Train- 
ing to become an Explorer and a Missionary. — Be- 
comes a Medical Practitioner and afterwards makes a 
Business Venture in a Sawmill. — His Character and 
Physique. — His First Trip to the West, in Company 
with Mr. Parker. — The Nez Perces and the Flatheads 
receive them gladly. — His Marriage at Prattsburg, 
N. F., and Return to the West. — A Demand for Mis- 
sionaries and Immigrants that Oregon may be occupied 
and held by the United States. — Whitman goes East to 
stimulate the Mission Board and to direct Immigration 
into Oregon. — Whitman publishes a Pamphlet on the 
Desirableness of Oregon for American Colonists. — 
Numerous Influences that brought about the Emigration 
of 1843. — Whitman'' s Outlook for the Future Pros- 
perity of the Immigrants. — His Death and that of his 
Wife in the Massacre of 1847. 



CHAPTER XII 



MARCUS WHITMAN: THE HERO OF OREGON 

^HERE is prob- 
ably not an- 
other example 
of the spring- 
ing to life of the 
seeds of Chris- 
tianity more in- 
teresting than 
in the case of 
the Lewis and 
Clark expedi- 
tion into that 
far country 
where rolls the Oregon. To what extent the scat- 
tering of this seed was performed with any seri- 
ous expectation of success is not to be discovered; 
but it seems that wherever that strange-looking 




802 Pilots of the Republic 

band of explorers and scientists fared and was 
remembered by the aborigines that came under 
its influence, so widely had there gone the legend 
of the white man's Saviour. The Indians heard 
that the white man had a "Book from Heaven" 
which told them the way to walk in order to know 
happiness and reach the happy hunting-grounds ; 
with this race, which lived forever on the verge 
of starvation, the expression " happy hunting 
grounds " — land where there was always game 
to be obtained — meant far more than the hack- 
neyed expression does to us to-day. A book giv- 
ing explicit directions for reaching a place where 
there was always something to eat was a thing 
to be sought for desperately and long; they did 
not appreciate the argument, once advanced with 
no Httle acumen by a Wyandot Indian, that, 
since the Indian knew neither the art of writing 
nor that of book-making, the Great Spirit could 
never have meant them to find the way of life 
in a book. On the contrary, these western 
Indians — Flatheads and Nez Perces — held a 
great meeting, probably in the early Spring of 



Pilots of the Republic 303 

1832, and appointed two old men and two young 
men to go back and visit their " Father," General 
Clark, at St. Louis. 

" I came to you," one of them is reported to 
have said to Clark when at last they reached 
St. Louis, " over a trail of many moons from the 
setting sun. You were the friend of my fathers, 
who have all gone the long way. I came with 
one eye partly open, for more light for my people 
who sit in darkness. ... I am going back the 
long, sad trail to my people of the dark land. 
You make my feet heavy with burdens of gifts, 
and my moccasins will grow old in carrying them, 
but the Book is not among them. When I tell 
my poor blind people, after one more snow, in 
the Big Council, that I did not bring the Book, 
no word will be spoken by our old men or by our 
young braves. One by one they will rise up and 
go out in silence. My people will die in darkness, 
and they will go on the long path to the other 
hunting ground. No white men will go with 
them and no white man's Book to make the way 
plain." Two of the four Indians died in St. 



304 Pilots of the Republic 

Louis, and the surviving two went West in the 
same caravan with George Catlin, the famous 
portrait painter, who included their portraits, it 
is said, in his collection, — Numbers 207 and 209 
in the Catlin Collection of the Smithsonian 
Institution. 

The first missionary effort in the Far West 
was put forth by the Methodist General Con- 
ference, which sent the Rev. Jason Lee westward, 
starting overland from Fort Independence in 
April, 1834. The mission was located seventy 
miles up the Willamette River, and, singularly 
enough, the Nez Perces, who had sent emissaries 
to the " men near to God," who had the " Book 
from Heaven," were passed by. 

In the Spring of the same year the American 
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 
including then both Congregationahsts and Pres- 
byterians, became interested in the new field for 
explorers and in this strange call that had come 
ringing across the vast prairies and rugged 
mountains of the unknown West, as, in a pre- 
vious study, we have noticed that the Moravian 



Pilots of the Republic 305 

Brethren became interested in the call that came 
half a century before across the Alleghanies 
from the Delawares on the Muskingum. Nor 
was the David Zeisberger, fearless, patient, and 
devoted, found to be wanting in the present in- 
stance, for the call came through a channel now 
difficult to trace to a young man who was able 
to endure and dare. 

Two years after the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century Marcus Whitman was born at 
Rushville, New York, of New England parent- 
age, strong both morally and intellectually. 
His early life was spent in a typical pioneer 
home, where he knew the toil, the weariness, and 
the hearty humble joys of that era, — a home 
in which independence and general strength of 
character were formed and confirmed. The loss 
of his father when he was at the age of eight 
laid upon the shoulders of the growing lad 
responsibilities which made him old beyond his 
years. All this certainly had its part in pre- 
paring him for the sublimely humble work, as 
it seemed, that he was to be called upon to do; 

20 



306 Pilots of the Republic 

and little could he have known that there were 
to come those days of agony and exhaustion 
which demanded all his latent accumulation of 
iron strength and courage of steel, — days that 
would demand all his stores of resourceful fore- 
sight. Whitman's education was probably in- 
diiFerent, — at least it was not above the average 
of the day. Converted at the age of seventeen, 
he did not join a church until he was twenty- 
two, which may be taken as showing the reticent 
or, rather, unobtrusive character of the man. An 
early purpose to prepare for the ministry was 
thwarted by physical weakness, and the young 
man proceeded to study medicine in the Berk- 
shire Medical College at Pittsfield, Massachu- 
setts. The first years of practice were spent in 
Canada; returning then to New York, his at- 
tention was unexpectedly absorbed in a business 
venture with his brother in a sawmill. How 
difficult it must have been for any one to read 
this leading aright, so seemingly adverse was it 
to the prescribed course that was customary 
among practitioners. Yet the same knowledge 



Pilots of the Republic 307 

of business, perhaps, would not have come 
to Whitman in any other way, and it was 
providentially to stand him in good stead. 

" Dr. Whitman was a strong man, earnest, decided, 
aggressive. He was sincere and kind, generous to a 
fault. . . . He was fearless of danger, strong in pur- 
pose, resolute and unflinching in the face of difficulties. 
At times he became animated and earnest in argument 
or conversation, but in general he would be called a 
man of reticence. He was above medium height, rather 
spare than otherwise, had deep blue eyes, a large 
mouth, and, in middle life, hair that would be called 
iron-gray." 

Of Miss Prentiss of Prattsburg, New York, 
who soon became Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Martha 
J. Lamb has said: 

" She was a graceful blonde, stately and dignified in 
her bearing, without a particle of aff^ectation. When 
he was preparing to leave for Oregon, the church held 
a farewell service and the minister gave out the 
well-known hymn: 

Yes, my native land, I love thee. 

Can I bid you all farewell ? 



308 Pilots of the Republic 

The whole congregation joined heartily in the singing, 
but before the hymn was half through, one by one 
they ceased singing, and audible sobs were heard in 
every part of the great audience. The last stanza 
was sung by the sweet voice of Mrs. Whitman alone, 
clear, musical, and unwavering." 

Whitman's first Western trip was a hurried 
tour of observation made in company with the 
Rev. Samuel Parker, a graduate of Williams. 
Leaving St. Louis in the Spring of 1835, they 
reached the country of the Nez Perces and Flat- 
heads in August. It is interesting to note that 
these men crossed the Great Divide by way of 
the South Pass, concerning which Mr. Parker 
made an astounding prophecy, as follows: 

" Though there are some elevations and depressions 
in this valley, yet, comparatively speaking, it is level, 
and the summit, where the waters divide which flow into 
the Atlantic and into the Pacific, is about six thousand 
feet above the level of the ocean. There would be no 
difficulty in the way of constructing a railroad from 
the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. There is no greater 
difficulty in the whole distance than has already been 



Pilots of the Republic 309 

overcome in passing the Green Mountains between 
Boston and Albany ; and probably the time may not 
be far distant when trips will be made across the con- 
tinent, as they have been made to the Niagara Falls, 
to see Nature's wonders." 

The interviews with the Indians were uniform 
in character, and showed that the missionaries 
would receive hospitality at the hands of the 
Nez Perces and Flatheads. Wrote Mr. Parker: 

" We laid before them the object of our appointment, 
and explained to them the benevolent desires of Chris- 
tians concerning them. We then inquired whether they 
wished to have teachers come among them, and instruct 
them in the knowledge of God, His worship, and the 
way to be saved; and what they would do to aid them 
in their labors. The oldest chief arose, and said he 
was old, and did not expect to know much more; he 
was deaf and could not hear, but his heart was made 
glad, very glad, to see what he had never seen before, a 
man near to God, — meaning a minister of the Gospel." 

It took only ten days in the country of the 
Indians to assure the men of the rich promise 
offered by the field; whereupon Dr. Whitman 



310 Pilots of the Republic 

turned his face eastward, to make his report 
and be ready in the following Spring to re- 
turn with reenforcements with a caravan of the 
American Fur Company. A great enthusiasm 
had seized him. He wTote to Miss Prentiss, 

" I have a strong desire for that field of labor. . . . 
I feel greatly encouraged to go on in every sense, 
only, I f eef my unfitness for the work ; but I know in 
whom I have trusted, and with whom are the fountains 
of wisdom. . . . You need not be anxious especially 
for your health or safety, but for your usefulness to 
the cause of Missions and the souls of our benighted 
fellow-men." 

Dr. Whitman was married early in 1836, 
and the couple were driven by sleigh from 
Elmira, New York, to Hollidaysburg, Penn- 
sylvania, where they took a canal-boat over the 
Alleghany Portage Railway on their way west- 
ward. Their principal companions were the Rev. 
Henry H. Spaulding, a graduate of Western 
Reserve College, — two or three years Whit- 
man's junior, — and wife, and Mr. William H. 
Gray; there were also two teamsters and two 



Pilots of the Republic 311 

Indian boys, whom Dr. Whitman had brought 
East with him. Joining the caravan of the 
American Fur Company at Council Bluffs, they 
reached Fort Laramie early in June, and the 
South Pass on the following Fourth of July, 
where six years later Fremont raised an Ameri- 
can flag and gained the immortal name of 
" Pathfinder." 

It is difficult to emphasize sufficiently the his- 
toric importance and significance of the advent 
of these women into the country beyond the 
Great Divide in Whitman's light wagon and 
cart; true, Ashley, Bridger, and Bonneville had 
taken wagons into the Rockies and left them 
there, but it was for this sturdy and determined 
physician to take a woman across the mountains 
in 1836, showing at once the practicability of a 
wagon road from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 
But the wagon seemed hardly less wonderful 
than the patient women in it. Rough moun- 
taineers who had come to the rendezvous of the 
American Fur Company just westward of the 
" divide " were dumbfounded at the sight of 



312 Pilots of the Republic 

the first white women on whom they had laid eyes 
since they had reached the States; tears came 
to the eyes of some of them as they shook hands 
with the first white women that ever crossed the 
Rocky Mountains; Mrs. Spaulding had been 
very ill, and the rough devotion of these men 
and their Indian -wives gave her new hope and 
courage for the work. On the other hand, 
" From that day," one of these men said, " I 
was a better man." But it was for an old trap- 
per to see the real national significance of the 
advent of these women into that far-flung 
country. " There," he said, pointing to the 
women, " is something which the honorable 
Hudson Bay Company cannot get rid of. They 
cannot send these women out of the country. 
They had come to stay." 

Dr. Whitman chose his station at Waiilatpu, 
near Walla Walla, Washington, while Spauld- 
ing went a hundred miles and more eastward 
among the Nez Perces of the Clearwater Valley. 
A quart of wheat brought with them, cherished 
as were the twelve potatoes brought around 



Pilots of the Republic 313 

Cape Horn by the pioneers of Astoria a quarter 
of a century before, was planted amid hopes 
and fears, and yielded, in less than a dozen 
years, nearly thirty thousand bushels in a sea- 
son. Their few cows multiplied to a herd; 
gardens and orchards were laid out; a printing 
press and sheep were secured from the Hawaiian 
Islands, and upon the press was printed a code 
of laws, differing in no great degree from those 
issued in Zeisberger's sweet "Meadow of Light" 
on the Muskingum half a century before. Mrs. 
Spaulding's school numbered five hundred pupils, 
and a church had grown to a membership of 
one hundred. 

It is not possible here to trace with faithful- 
ness the brave successes now achieved, for we 
are seeking but one of the many lessons to be 
found in the Whitman story. There was labor 
and success for all, and trial for all as well; 
there were some differences of opinion among 
the workers, to be settled as the field grew large, 
for these men were independent thinkers, each 
one a man among his fellows. And then there 



314 Pilots of the Republic 

was the rivalry with the missionaries to the 
northward, the Catholic priests located at Van- 
couver and extending their influence wherever 
the Hudson Bay Company, in turn, extended 
its interests. The priests, it should be observed, 
had been called in by the Company to take the 
place of the missionary of the Church of Eng- 
land, whom the Company had sent home. We 
cannot discuss here the tangled Oregon ques- 
tion and the tactics of America's rivals for that 
beautiful stretch of country. Two things stand 
fairly plain in it all: to be held, Oregon must 
have a strong American quota of settlers, and 
these missionaries were on the ground when the 
matter was precipitated. 

The conquest of Oregon was to be made, if 
made at all, at the hands of an army of men 
with broadaxes on their shoulders; not elsewhere 
in our national annals does this appear more 
clearly than in the case of Oregon. In the mili- 
tary sense there was no conquest to be effected; 
an enterprising fur company, controlled by men 
of principle but served by perfectly unprincipled 



Pilots of the Republic 315 

agents, sought the land for its wealth of skins, 
and would not have wished it " opened," in 
any sense, to the world. The case is quite 
parallel to the attitude of England at the close 
of the Old French War, described on a pre- 
vious page ^ ; the proclamation of 1763, per- 
mitting no pioneer to erect a cabin beyond the 
head-springs of the Atlantic rivers, because, if 
populated, the land would not pour its treas- 
ures into the coffers of a spendthrift king, was 
as idle a selfish dream as was ever conceived with 
reference to Oregon by a Hudson Bay Com- 
pany's engage. In the case of no other distinct 
region in our entire domain, perhaps, was it 
equally plain that the first people to really oc- 
cupy would be, in all likelihood, the people that 
would control and at last possess it. It was like 
so many early military campaigns in America, 
as, for instance, Forbes's march on Fort Du- 
quesne and Clark's advance to Vincennes, — to 
reach the destination was of itself the chief 
hardship ; for if in the case of Forbes that great 

1 See p. 46. 



316 Pilots of the Republic 

army could be once thrown across the Alle- 
ghanies where lay Braddock's mouldering bones, 
the capitulation of Fort Duquesne would be but 
a commonplace consequent. 

What might have been the result had not this 
fragile missionary movement into the empire of 
Oregon (including, of course, Oregon, Wash- 
ington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wy- 
oming) taken place cannot now be determined, 
but the rival interests were hurrying emigrants 
from Red River and from Canada in the full 
belief that to hold would mean to have. A 
counter action was that put forth by the Ameri- 
can missionaries of all denominations in Oregon, 
chief of whom was Marcus Whitman. It seems 
as though some winters have believed that there 
can be a line drawn between what these first 
Americans did to promote missionary success and 
that done to advance what may be called Ameri- 
can political interests in Oregon; to the present 
writer this seems impossible. What helped the 
one helped the other, whether the motive com- 
prehended the larger interests at stake or not. 



Pilots of the Republic 317 

That the missionaries desired that the Americans 
coming into Oregon should be men of sobriety 
and character should not in the least argue that 
they did not desire them at the same time to be 
good patriotic citizens, eager for their country's 
welfare. It is hardly fair to imply that these 
men were poor patriots in proportion as they 
were good missionaries; nor can the proposition 
be more reasonably entertained that these brave 
men desired to promote emigration thither in 
order to secure more assistance or success in the 
missionary work in which they were engaged. 
In all these considerations the hope of mission- 
ary success was inextricably bound up with na- 
tional extension and national growth. Were the 
mission stations to be increased, it was of na- 
tional moment; were they to be decreased, it was 
an ominous sign so far as possible American 
dominion was concerned. 

Unfortunate internal trouble among the mis- 
sionaries, due to differences of opinion on policies 
and ways and means, caused the American 
Board to decide to eliminate a portion of the 



318 Pilots of the Republic 

mission stations. Just what steps were to be 
taken is not important to us here; the important 
thing is the influence of this curtailing of the 
work of the American missionary. Was it to 
strengthen or weaken America's claim to the 
empire of Oregon? Was it to hinder or help 
the occupation of the land on the part of rival 
spirits? Those who might hold that the question 
was one of missionary policy totally apart from 
national politics take a view of the matter in 
which the present writer cannot share. These 
men were Americans; it is difficult to believe 
that with the Oregon question to the front these 
missionaries (who were on the spot) confined 
their attention solely to the missionary problem 
heedless of the national problem, which must 
have embraced and included all others in any 
analysis. 

The missionaries met to consider the order of 
the American Board late in the Fall of 1842. 
Marcus Whitman was granted leave of absence 
to ^asit the East and persuade the officers of 
the Board to rescind their action. Wrote one 



Pilots of the Republic 319 

of the missionaries of the Board immediately 
after Whitman's departm*e concerning his 
plan: 

" I have no doubt that if his plan succeeds it will be 
one of great good to the mission and country. It is to 
be expected that a Romish influence will come in. . . . 
To meet this influence a few religious settlers around a 
station would be invaluable." ^ 

This contemporary document, written just as 
Whitman was leaving, ought to be good evi- 
dence, first, that he had a definite errand, and, 
secondly, that it concerned new emigrants. 

The friends of Whitman have gone very far 
in an attempt to maintain that he left Oregon 
hurriedly on the brave ride he now undertook 
in order to reach Washington in time to accom- 
plish a specific political errand ; if nothing more, 
such a sweeping assertion was sure to be called 
into question, and when this was done the querists 
were likely to be unable to keep from going to 
the other extreme of denying that Whitman ever 

1 Dr. Gushing Eells's letter in archives of A. B. C. F. M. , Boston. 



320 Pilots of the Republic 

went to Washington or had any pohtical motive 
in coming East.^ 

A brief but careful view of the documents 
in the case has inclined us to the view that 
Whitman came East as he did in order to be 
in time to have a part in arousing interest in 
and directing the course of the large emigra- 
tion that it was felt would turn toward Oregon 
in the Spring of 1843. We are the more inclined 
to this opinion for the reason that this was the 
most important thing by far that could have 
occupied the man's mind, however one views the 
question; what could more have benefited the 
mission cause than a flood-tide of American 
pioneers into Oregon with axes to sing that old 
home-lo^ang song sung long ago in the Alle- 
ghanies, in Ohio, in Kentucky, and beyond? 
And what more, pray, could be done than this 
to advance the interests of the United States 
hereabouts? In point of fact the nation had de- 
pended on the conquest of Oregon by pioneers, 

1 "The Legend of Whitman's Ride," by Prof. E. G. Bourne, 
American Historical Review, January, 1901. 



Pilots of the Republic 321 

if it was to be conquered at all; treaties could 
be made and broken, but a conquest by the axe- 
bearing army would be final. 

" The policy," wTites Justin Winsor, " which 
the United States soon after developed was one 
in which Great Britain could hardly compete, 
and this was to possess the [Oregon] country 
by settlers as against the nominal occupancy of 
the fur-trading company directed from Mon- 
treal. By 1832 this movement of occupation 
was fully in progress. By 1838 the interest was 
renewed in Congress, and a leading and ardent 
advocate of the American rights. Congressman 
Linn of JNIissouri, presented a report to the 
Senate and a bill for the occupation of Oregon, 
June 6, 1838. A report by Caleb Cushing com- 
ing from the Committee on Foreign Affairs 
respecting the Territory of Oregon, accompanied 
by a map, was presented in January and Feb- 
ruary in 1839: 

" ' It was not till 1842 that the movements of aggres- 
sion began to become prominent In politics, and immi- 
gration was soon assisted by Fremont's discovery of 

21 



322 Pilots of the Republic 

the pass over the Rocky Mountains at the head of the 
La Platte.-^ Calhoun in 1845 took the position that the 
tide of immigration was solving the difficulty and it 
was best to wait that issue and not force a conflict.' " 

It seems perfectly certain that Whitman was 
concerned especially with this " tide of immi- 
gration." He left home October 3; in eleven 
days Fort Hall was reached, four hundred miles 
away. Finding it best, he struck southward on 
the old Santa Fe Trail, by way of Fort Wintah, 
Fort Uncompahgre, and Fort Taos. From 
Santa Fe the course was in part by the old 
Santa Fe Trail to Bent's Fort and Independence. 
Bent's Fort was left January 7, 1843, but the 
date of reaching Westport (Kansas City), Mis- 
souri, is not definitely known; it was probably 
the last of January, and here he was busy for 
some little time helping to shape things up for 
the much talked of emigration of 1843. Indeed, 
there is evidence that he did not leave Westport 
until at least the 15th of February. Possibly 
it was here that he prepared and published a 

1 Dr. Whitman's route, as we have seen, in 1836. 



Pilots of the Republic 323 

pamplilet describing Oregon, the soil, climate, 
and its desirableness for American colonists, and 
said that " he had crossed the Rocky Mountains 
that winter principally to take back that season 
a train of wagons to Oregon." The Doctor 
assured his countrymen that wagons could be 
taken to the Columbia River. " It was this 
assurance of the missionary," wTote one emi- 
grant, " that induced my father and several of 
his neighbors to sell out and start at once for 
this country." ^ 

If this line of investigation is followed steadily 
with reference to Dr. Whitman's Eastern visit, 
the result is eminently satisfactory from any 
point of view. It is well and good to believe 
that he attempted to right the minds of some 
eminent men on the Oregon question, but he 
probably accomplished more by some plain talks 
with a score of frontiersmen at Westport and by 
his pamphlet on the subject than by visiting ten 
thousand men in high authority. What was to 

1 " Letter of John Zachrey," Senate Ex. Doc. No. 37, Forty-first 
Congress, Third Session. 



324 Pilots of the Republic 

save Oregon was the emigration movement, — 
the rank and file of the army with the broadaxe, 
— not Whitman or Webster or a President or 
a congressman or a hundred congressmen. This 
Oregon missionary was a plain, straightforward, 
brave, modest man, not seeking notoriety, come 
eastward to have a part in inducing emigration 
that must start, if at all, in the Spring months. 
There you have an explanation for the Winter's 
ride. 

Pressing on eastward. Whitman went to 
Washington; this has been questioned because 
none of the public prints of the city noised 
abroad his coming or his presence. This proves he 
was not there as much as the absence of his foot- 
prints on those streets to-day proves it ; so far as 
it indicates anything, it only shows the man was 
not seeking notoriety and cheap advertisement. 
A year afterwards, in June, 1844, the Hon. 
James M. Porter, Secretary of War, received a 
letter from Marcus Whitman which began, 
" In compliance with the request you did me 
the honor to make last winter, while in Wash- 



Pilots of the Republic 325 

ington, I herewith transmit to you the synopsis 
of a bill." Another sentence runs, " I have, 
since our interview, been," etc.,^ making, in all, 
two definite statements in his own hand to the 
effect that Whitman visited the Secretary of 
War in Washington, and that while there he 
talked with the Secretary of War concerning the 
national character of the Oregon movement. 
Any who might incline to the view that Whit- 
man came East solely on a mission errand must 
pay small attention to this letter, which proves 
that the Secretary of War and Whitman must 
have talked of a bill relative to Oregon emigra- 
tion. Whitman certainly conversed with Porter 
along the lines of their subsequent correspond- 
ence, which resulted in the missionary's sending 
in a bill authorizing the President of the United 
States to estabHsh a line of 

" agricultural posts or farming stations, extending at 
intervals from the present and most usual crossing of 
the Kansas River, west of the western boundary of the 
State of Missouri, thence ascending the Platte River 

1 Letter file, office of Secretary of War, received June 22, 1844. 



326 Pilots of the Republic 

on the southern border, thence through the valley of 
the Sweetwater to Fort Hall, and thence to settlements 
of the Willamette in the Territory of Oregon. Which 
said posts will have for their object to set examples of 
civilized industry to the several Indian tribes, to keep 
them in proper subjection to the laws of the United 
States, to suppress violent and lawless acts along the 
said line of the frontier, to' facihtate the passage of 
troops and munitions of war into and out of the said 
Territory of Oregon, and the transportation of the mail 
as hereinafter provided." 

Whitman reached Boston probably March 30. 
There seems to be no question that his chief 
errand here with the officers of the American 
Board was to interest them in a plan to induce 
emigration for the sake of preserving the mis- 
sions. On his return to Oregon he wrote Sec- 
retary Greene of the Board: 

" A [Catholic] bishop is set over this part of the 
work, whose seat, as the name indicates, will be at 
Walla WaUa. He, I understand, is styled Bishop 
of Walla Walla. It will be well for you to know that 
from what we can learn, their object will be to colonize 
around them. I cannot blame myself that the plan I 



Pilots of the Republic 327. 

laid down when I was in Boston was not carried out. 
If we could have had good families, say two and three 
together, to have placed in select spots among the 
Indians, the present crisis, which I feared, would not 
have come. Two things, and it is true those which were 
the most important, were accomplished by my return 
to the States. By means of the establishment of the 
wagon road, which is due to that effort alone, the 
immigration was secured and saved from disaster in 
the Fall of forty-three. Upon that event the present 
acquired rights of the U. States by her citizens hung. 
And not less certain is it that upon the result of 
immigration to this country the present existence of 
this mission and of Protestantism in general hung also. 
It is a matter of surprise to me that so few pious men 
are ready to associate together and come to this coun- 
try, when they could be so useful in setting up and 
maintaining religious society and establishing the means 
of education. It is indeed so that some of the good 
people of the East can come to Oregon for the double 
purpose of availing themselves of the Government 
bounty of land and of doing good to the country." 

This quotation undoubtedly contains in out- 
line the fundamental purpose of Dr. Whitman's 
journey eastward through the Winter's snows; 



328 Pilots of the Bepublic 

the American missions in Oregon were evidently 
on the point of being actually crowded out by 
the threatened emigrants from the North; to 
hold the ground gained, a rival emigration from 
the States was an imperative necessity, and that 
was the thing for which Whitman was working. 
So closely bound were the real interests, then, 
of the missions and the territorial interests of the 
United States, that for one to attempt a tech- 
nical separation is to do an injustice to both. 
Read as widely as you will the few manuscripts 
left us in Dr. Whitman's hand, and the impres- 
sion grows stronger wdth each word that the 
man was exceptionally clear-sighted and sane; 
and while a great deal of nonsense is and has 
been put into circulation about liim, so far as 
Whitman himself is concerned we find his atten- 
tion given to roads and trails, forage and pro- 
visions, axle grease and water; in all he wrote 
(and there is sufficient for a very fair guess 
at his purpose and plans) we find ahnost no ref- 
erence whatever to the greater national work 
which he was actually doing, — a fact that 



Pilots of the Republic 329 

cannot but be forever enjoyed by those to whom 
his splendid Hf e work will appeal. 

On May 12 Wliitman was again in St. Louis 
writing Secretary Greene, " I hope no time will 
be lost in seizing every favorable means of induc- 
ing good men to favor the interest of the Ore- 
gon." We should say here that, while in Boston, 
Whitman induced the officers of the American 
Board to rescind their action abolishing certain 
of the mission stations in Oregon. Now once 
more on the frontier, Whitman found that his 
hope of a large American emigration to Oregon 
was in a fair way of being realized; as George 
Rogers Clark came back to Virginia from Ken- 
tuckj^ at an opportune moment to urge Patrick 
Henry to authorize the far-famed Illinois cam- 
paign, so now Marcus Whitman had come East 
at an opportune moment to add what weight he 
could in the interests of an Oregon campaign. 
But as in the case of Clark's visit to Virginia, so 
now, far more important causes had been at work 
to bring the desired result than the mere coming 
of a messenger. It would indeed be impossible 



330 Pilots of the Republic 

to estimate the large number of forces that 
had been at work to bring about the famous emi- 
gration of 1843, but among them should be re- 
membered the long debates in Congress on the 
Ashburton Treaty, the Linn Bill concerning 
Oregon lands, Greenhow's " Memoir," and Lieu- 
tenant Wilkes's report, as well as the missionary 
efforts of the various denominations, and the 
.Whitman pamphlet, before referred to. 

As a result, as singular and interesting an army 
as ever bore the broadaxe westward now began 
to rendezvous in May near Independence, Kan- 
sas, just beyond the Missouri line. It would 
probably have gathered there to go forth to its 
brave conquest though there had been no Marcus 
Whitman or Daniel Webster, or any other man 
or set of men that ever lived; the saying that 
Whitman " saved Oregon " is just as false as 
the saying that Washington was the " Father of 
his Country," or that Thomas was the " Rock 
of Chickamauga," or Webster the " Defender of 
the Constitution" — and just as true; it is a 
boast, a toast, an idle fable to those who 



Pilots of the Republic 331 

disbelieve it, a precious legend of heroism and 
magnetism to those who glory in it. On the 
18th of May a committee of the emigrants was 
appointed to go to Independence and inquire of 
Whitman concerning the " practicability of the 
road," as one of the party (George Wilkes) 
wrote; another pioneer (Peter H. Burnett) said 
that on the twentieth he attended a meeting with 
Colonels Thornton and Bartleson, ^Ir. Rickman 
and Dr. Whitman, at which meeting rules 
and regulations for the " Oregon Emigrating 
Society " were adopted. There is no doubt that 
Whitman's advice was of considerable impor- 
tance. Any man who had taken a wagon over 
the Rockies would have been of prime importance 
to these emigrants, irrespective of any other 
considerations. On the 22d of May the van- 
guard of the army started, with John Gant as 
guide, and the Kansas River was reached on 
the 26th, and wholly crossed on the last day 
of May. On the 30th of May we find him 
writing to Secretary Greene in the following 
strain : 



332 Pilots of the Republic 

" You will be surprised to see that we are not yet 
started. Lieutenant Fremont left this morning. The 
emigrants have some of them just gone, and others have 
been gone a week, and some are yet coming on. I shall 
start to-morrow. I regret I could not have spent some 
of the time spent here in suspense with my friends at 
the East. 

" I have only a lad of thirteen, my nephew, with me. 
I take him to have some one to stay with Mrs. Whitman. 
I cannot give you much of an account of the emigrants 
until we get on the road. It is said that there are over 
two hundred men besides women and children. They 
look like a fair representative of a country population. 
Few, I conclude, are pious. Fremont intends to return 
by land, so as to be back early in winter. Should he 
succeed in doing so we may be able to send you an 
account of the Mission and country at that time. We 
do not ask you to become the patrons of emigration to 
Oregon, but we desire you to use your influence that, in 
connection with all the influx into the country, there 
may be a fair proportion of good men of our own 
denomination who shall avail themselves of the advan- 
tages of the country in common with others. Also that 
ministers should come out as citizens or under the Home 
Missionary Society. We think agents of the Board and 
of the Home Missionary Society, as also ministers and 



Pilots of the Republic 833 

good men in general, may do much to send a share of 
good, pious people to that country. We cannot feel 
it to be at all just that we do nothing, while worldly 
men and Papists are doing so much. ... I wish to say 
a few words about manufactures in Oregon, that I 
may remove an impression that they cannot compete 
with the English. First, let us take the operatives and 
the raw material from the Pacific Islands. It matters 
not at how much labor the Islander cleans the cotton, 
for it gives him employment, and for that he gets goods, 
and then for his coffee and sugar and salt and cotton, 
etc., etc., he gets goods also. This is all an exchange 
trade that only a population and manufacturers in 
Oregon can take advantage of, because they alone will 
want the articles of exchange which the Islander can 
give. The same will hold good in relation to Indians 
whenever they shall have sheep, and I intend to try and 
have the Government give them sheep instead of money, 
a result not likely to be delayed long. A good man 
or company can now select the best mill sites and spots, 
and likely would find a sawmill profitable at once. I 
think our greatest hope for having Oregon at least part 
Protestant now lies in encouraging a proper intention 
of good men to go there while the country is open. I 
want to call your attention to the operation of Famham 
of Salem and the Bcnsons of New York in Oregon. I 



334 Pilots of the Republic 

am told credibly that secretly Government aids them with 
the secret service fund. Captain Howard of Maine is 
also in expectation of being employed by Government to 
take out emigrants by ship should the Oregon Bill pass." 

Those who love the memory of this brave 
missionary must hold this letter exceedingly 
precious; it has, in addition to its enthusiasm 
and patriotism, that sane and practical outlook 
on the future that pervades so much of Wash- 
ington's writings, especially the letters to Wil- 
liam Crawford. Here is another man looking, 
on the Pacific slope, for such important com- 
monplace things as miU sites in 1843, just as 
Washington was looking for mill sites in the 
Ohio Valley in 1770, and between the two it 
would be difficult to say which was the more 
seriously optimistic, though the influence of both 
must have been strong, in their respective days, 
on the advancing pioneer. 

For all the daring of the hardy Winter's 
journey that Whitman made ^ we look upon this 

1 Friends of Whitman have unfortunately exaggerated this Winter's 
ride ; though a daring feat, it has many parallels in the annals of the 



Pilots of the Republic 335 

other journey, with this splendid army of nearly 
a thousand Oregon pioneers and home-builders, 
as the one of supremest importance. Ay, here 
was Whitman's Ride, — not sung, perhaps, so 
widely as the one in the Winter's snows, and 
yet the one ride which Oregon could not have 
missed, and the one she can never forget! Let 
the fruitless debate go on as to the exact meas- 
ure of this unpretentious missionary's influence 
in shaping Government policies and moulding 
public opinion; it is enough for me to know 
that he viewed the whole question as keenly as 
his few letters prove he unquestionably did, and 
then to know that when the great emigration 
started he was there to direct and inspire; that 
he could do the humblest duty and say the least 
about it, and at the same time show Fremont 
where to go if he would gain the immortal title 
of " Pathfinder." 

Whitman has suff*ered at the hands of his 
friends, who have been over- jealous touching 

old Salt Lake Trail, on which Jim Bridger built the fort that bore his 
name as early as 1837. 



336 Pilots of the Republic 

matters concerning which his own lovable modesty 
and reticence would not allow him to speak ; they 
have made claims and inferences unwarranted by 
the known facts of the case. His Winter's ride 
has been compared with Sheridan's from Win- 
chester, and tasted no better in some mouths than 
does the ballad of Sheridan's Ride in the mouths 
of Crook's men, who knew their leader had, an 
hour back, given and carried out the order Sher- 
idan is said (in the poem) to have given when he 
dashed upon the scene, when, in fact, he merely 
came to Crook and asked him what he had done.^ 
And yet Reid's poem is as true to the spirit of 
the indomitable Sheridan as Butterfield's is true 
of Whitman. 

We have compared Whitman on the Walla 
Walla to Zeisberger on the Muskingum; and 
the terrible massacre of November 29, 1847, 
in which the brave hero of Oregon, with his 
wife and twelve others, gave their lives, be- 
longs in history with the awful Gnadenliiitten 
tragedy. The murder of these brave pioneers 

^ The report of a worthy eyewitness of the Thirty-sixth Ohio. 



Pilots of the Republic 337 

by Indians, to whom they had given the best 
of their hves and all their strength and prayers, 
is quite as fiendishly incongruous as the de- 
struction of the Moravian band of corn-huskers 
by frenzied Monongahela frontiersmen; in 
each case the murderers knew not what they 
did. 

But Whitman's work was done, for we have 
it in his own hand that he would be contented if 
posterity would remember, not that he had influ- 
enced a President or a Congress or saved an 
Empire, but merely, as he wrote, that he was 

" one of the first to take white women across the 
mountains and prevent the disaster and reaction which 
would have occurred by the breaking up of the present 
emigration, and establishing the first wagon road across 
to the border of the Columbia." ^ 

And yet when you study this boast you will 
find that it contains in its essence all that any 
boast for Whitman could hold; for it was an 

1 Whitman to Secretary Greene, Nov. 1, 1843 ; Mowry, Marcus 
Whitman, 267. 

92 



338 Pilots of the Republic 

army of axe-bearers that was to save Oregon; 
and if Meade won Gettysburg or Wolfe captured 
Quebec, then Whitman and the Americans who 
went in his track won for America the northern 
Pacific slope. 



I 



CHAPTER XIII 

Captains of American Expansion always to be found in the 
National Legislature. — Great National Advance in the 
Second and Third Decades of the Nineteenth Century. 
— Definition of'"'' The American System^ — The Doc- 
trine that Public Surplus should be used for Internal 
Improvements held for only a Short Time. — Party 
Struggles regarding Cumberland Road Legislation. — 
Inconsistent Resolutions of Congress on this Matter. — 
The Drift of Public Sentiment toward putting Works 
of Improvement under the Care of the Government. — 
Numerous Competitors for National Aid toward Local 
Improvements. — Mutual Jealousy of Various Localities 
xvith Regard to the Distribution of Government Aid. — 
Disputes as to the Comparative Usefulness of Canals 
and Railroads. — Pone's Sarcasm on the Abuse of the 
Word " National " as applied to the Route of a Pro- 
posed Road from the Lakes to the Gulf. — Several Bene- 
fcial Measures passed by Congress in Spite of Strong 
Opposition. — Sums granted for Education, Road-build- 
ingy and Canal-building. — Benefcial Influence of the 
Governments Liberal Gifts as Encouragement to States 
and to Private Investors. 



CHAPTER XIII 



PILOTS OF "THE AMERICAN SYSTEM" 

S we have re- 
3 viewed from a 
more or less per- 
sonal standpoint 
some of the ex- 
ploits which defi- 
nitely made for 
the growth and 
expansion of the 
young Ameri- 
can Republic, it 
may have oc- 
1 curred to the 
reader that here was another great power at 
work helping, encouraging, and guiding the 
movement, — Pilots of the Republic in the halls 
of national legislation at Washington. 

L 




342 Pilots of the Republic 

Not that we refer specifically to any one man; 
some men, like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, 
can be pointed to at certain periods as men who 
occupied this position, who in a sense fathered, 
against all opposition, great measures that we 
see now were of tremendous advantage; if the 
position was abdicated by one man it was filled 
by another; and so down through the century 
and a quarter of our national existence there has 
been a power at work in our councils that has 
been optimistic, and at the same time true to 
the genius of America's geographical position 
and her high calling among the nations of the 
earth. It is not because this has been marvellously 
illustrated since the outbreak of the Spanish- 
American War that reference is made to it here, 
though the illustration is apposite and fair; 
but if we look back down the decades from the 
day that Congress signed that contract with 
Rufus Putnam and his Revolutionary patriots, 
or the day when Jefferson dared to effect the 
Louisiana Purchase, we shall continually find men 
sitting in the Congressional seats at the capital 




Pilots of the Republic 343 

who had the courage to try new paths, to as- 
sume common-sense views of the Constitution, 
and who beheved in their country and wished to 
see it shirk no great responsibihty. Such men 
as these were as truly captains of our expansion 
as was Putnam or Henderson or Astor. 

The age in our history to which our attention 
is turned on this subject is more particularly 
that lying between the beginning of the second 
and the ending of the third decade of last 
century. Much that was proposed before the 
opening of the nineteenth century, in the way of 
material national advance, was forgotten in the 
taxing days of 1811-1815. Chief among these 
was the Erie Canal proposition, and it is perhaps 
not too much to say that had the war with Eng- 
land not come as it did, possibly the Govern- 
ment would, by means of the money accruing 
from the sale of Michigan lands, have invested 
in the Erie Canal project; the Cumberland 
Road was one of the great works that went on 
despite the war. The moral effect of the vic- 
tories of Perry and Jackson, one to the north 



344 Pilots of the Republic 

and the other to the south, was very great; with 
the triumphant ending of the war the httle 
victorious nation sprang into a strength and a 
passion for power that well-nigh frightened 
those acquainted with the policy and conserva- 
tism of the ante-bellum days. 

We have touched slightly on one of the great 
questions of this most wonderful period of 
American history, that of the constitutionality'^ 
of the appropriations for the Cumberland Road, 
and Henry Clay's championship of the measure. 
But this was only one of a score of proposi- 
tions in a campaign of internal improvements, 
and Clay was but one of a hundred champions 
who assisted a weak nation to take on the ele- 
ments of strength by encouraging agriculture 
and manufactures, and binding a far-flung land 
by means of communication and intercourse. 

At the beginning of the second generation in 
the century the problem of internal improvements 
came to the fore as on no previous occasion, 
backed by the strongest men then in the public 
eye, — Clay, Calhoun, Adams, and Webster. 




Prksidknt James K. Polk 



Pilots of the Republic 345 

The Cumberland Road had been making its way 
westward, but had not yet thrown its tawny 
length over the Ohio River and into the States 
beyond. But the argument for this great na- 
tional work was not to be gainsaid, for the 
original compact with Ohio had been reiterated 
on the admission of Indiana, Illinois, and Mis- 
souri, respectively, and a part of the sales of 
the public lands in those States was already 
pledged to this object. As one of the fruits 
of the much discussed *' American System," 
championed by Henrj^ Clay, the Cumberland 
Road was a popular success, though there was 
never a time when any measure concerning it 
could not secure a strong following in the House 
and the Senate. 

The American System stood for a use of the 
public surplus for works of internal improve- 
ment; it was not a popular policy for a long 
time, but while in vogue it was of immeasurable 
benefit to the expanding country, its champions 
being veritable captains of the country's advance. 
The most interesting features of the history of 



346 Pilots of the Republic 

this doctrine are the vehemence with which it 
was advocated for a few critical years when 
nothing else would have equally aided the na- 
tional advance, the questionable basis on which 
the doctrine rested, and the readiness with which 
it was abandoned when its providential mission 
was effected. Even before the real internal 
improvement era came it was foreshadowed by 
the historic position of the two parties toward 
the object, as shown in Cumberland Road legis- 
lation. The bitterness of the struggle could not 
be shown better than by the repudiations of 
Congress in 1817 in its votes on this subject. 
In that year Congress passed the following 
inconsistent resolutions: (1) Congress has the 
power to build public roads and military roads, 
and to improve waterways; (2) Congress has 
not power to construct post roads or military 
roads; (3) Congress has not power to construct 
roads or canals to carry commerce between the 
States; (4) Congress has not power to construct 
military roads. " Thus we see," said a trium- 
phant enemy of the so-called American System, 



Pilots of the Republic 347 

" by the solemn decision of this House in 1817, 
all power over this subject was repudiated in 
everj'' form and shape." Despite these incon- 
sistencies the movement was ever a forward move- 
ment, until at last, in 1824, it assumed gigantic 
proportions, alarming to some degree the very 
men who had urged it forward. 

The revenue of the Government at this time 
was about twenty-five millions, and the running 
expenses — including interest on the slight re- 
maining debt — about half that sum. To what 
better use could the ten or twelve surplus 
miillion dollars be devoted than to the internal 
improvement of the land, as Gallatin and Jeffer- 
son had advocated twenty years before? Here 
the contest shifted to the tariff, a reduction of 
which would do away with the necessity of find- 
ing a way to employ a surplus. The drift of 
pubhc sentiment, however, was largely in favor 
of turning the fostering care of the Govern- 
ment to works of improvement, either by direct 
appropriation, or by taking stock in local com- 
panies, or by devoting to their use the proceeds 



348 Pilots of the Bepuhlic 

of the sale of public lands ; in any way the result 
would, be the same, and the nation as a whole 
would feel the benefit. 

The policy swept a large part of the country 
like wildfire, and ten thousand dreams, many 
of them chimerical to the last degree, were 
conceived. As a rule the result was, without 
question, bitter disappointment; but amid all 
the dangers that were in the way, and all the 
possibilities of untold harm, an influence was 
put to work that did more for the awakening 
of the young land than anything that had ever 
preceded it. Over a hundred and twenty-five 
claimants for national aid were considered by 
squads of engineers sent out by the Government. 
In the sarcastic words of one of the opposers of 
the system (and on this subject there was a 
chance for sarcasm that seldom came to Con- 
gressmen) every creek and mill-race in the 
United States was being surveyed by engineers 
sent out by the chief executive. It was asserted, 
and not without some plausibility, that such 
surveying expeditions were used very craftily to 



Pilots of the Republic 349 

influence votes, being sent to view rivers and 
roads in disputed regions where the information 
was circulated that, unless the champions of in- 
ternal improvement were put in power, great 
local blessings would be lost to these districts. 

But this was not by any means the chief dan- 
ger in the campaign. As was most forcefully 
argued by the opposition, the influence of this 
paternal policy on the part of the Government 
would be to awaken hostility and set one part 
of the nation against the other, for in no way 
could the division of the surplus be made equal. 
It could not be made on the basis of population 
even if this were admitted to be constitutional, 
for some parts of the country needed help far 
more than others; a naturally impregnable har- 
bor did not need a fourth of the money ex- 
pended on it that a comparatively defenceless 
harbor did. Again, the division could not, for 
the same reason, be made on the basis of re- 
ceipts; the States of the seaboard, in which 
the great part of the Government's revenue 
was raised, would then be almost the only 



350 Pilots of the Republic 

beneficiaries; the West would receive nothing. 
The accusation of favoritism came with piercing 
force. Suppose, for instance, New York and 
Mississippi should come at the same time to 
Congress, the one asking for the improvement 
of the Erie Canal, and the other for the 
improvement of the Mississippi River. Which 
party would Congress listen to if the public 
treasury was not in a position to satisfy 
both applicants? It was urged that this pro- 
cedure destroyed the whole principle of repre- 
sentative responsibility. Take the case of New 
York and her great canal, — the most important 
material improvement in the fifty years of the 
nation's life; New York came to the Govern- 
ment when the project was first broached, asking 
for aid. The cause was a good one; in peace 
it would be a benefit to at least six States, and 
in war it would be a national advantage of un- 
told moment; in fact, as we have seen, the 
possibility of another war with England along 
the Lakes was the very argument that turned the 
scale and caused the canal to be built. The 



Pilots of the Republic 351 

project was discouraged at Washington, and 
not a cent of Government treasure went into the 
undertaking. Why now, a score of years later, 
should New York representatives vote money 
from the national treasury for objects no less 
national or needful than the Erie Canal? Sev- 
eral neighboring States (Ohio, for instance) had 
declined to invest funds in the Erie Canal ven- 
ture when it was first promoted; why now should 
New York representatives vote national funds 
(such a large part of which came from New 
York ports) for improvements in these States, 
whose delegates in Congress refused aid to the 
Erie Canal in its dark hours? On the other hand 
it was urged that even the Erie Canal, the most 
famous work of internal improvement promoted 
by anj^ of the States, had done " nothing toward 
the extinguishment of its debt," up to 1830; if 
this great work did not reimburse the treasury 
w^hich built it, though operated by a purely local 
authority well acquainted with all conditions and 
able to take advantage of all circumstances, how 
would it be with works promoted by the national 



352 Pilots of the Republic 

Government, in distant parts of the country, 
with Httle or no knowledge of local circumstances 
or conditions? Another argument, more power- 
ful than was realized at the time, was that which 
prophesied the swift advance of the locomotive 
and the railroad, and the consequent decay and 
disuse of the common road and the canal. Said 
a member of Congress in debate on the floor 
of the House, " The honorable gentleman from 
Virginia [Mr. Mercer, the father of the Chesa- 
peake and Ohio Canal], Sir, must hear the 
appalling, the heartrending fact, that this 
mighty monument [the Chesapeake and Ohio 
Canal] which, for years, he has been laboring 
with zeal and exertion to erect to his memory, 
and which, no doubt, he had fondly hoped would 
transmit his name down to the latest posterity, 
must fall, and must give place to the superior 
improvement of railroads." 

On the proposed national road from Buffalo 
to ISTew Orleans by way of Washington the 
opposition poured out its vials of sarcasm and 
ridicule. To the arguments of the friends of 



Pilots of the Republic 353 

the measure, that the road was needed as a 
commercial and military avenue and for the use 
of the Post-office department, the reply was a 
denial so sweeping, from such reliable and in- 
formed parties, that there was no hope for the 
measure. Perhaps the strongest argument for 
the negative was advanced by James K. Polk, 
who was little less than withering in his fire, 
piling up ridicule on top of sarcasm to a de- 
gree seldom seen in Congress. Polk found that 
twenty-one routes between Washington and 
Buffalo had been outlined by engineers for this 
road " in the rage for engineering, surveying, 
reconnoitring, and electioneering." He alleged 
that the entire population in a space of territory 
one hundred miles in width between the two 
cities had been made to expect the road, and the 
surveys had been conducted in the heat of a 
political campaign. " The certain effect of this 
system, as exemplified by this road, is, first, to 
excite hopes; second, to produce conflicts of 
section arrayed against section; and lastly, dis- 
satisfaction and heart-burnings amongst all who 

23 



354 Pilots of the Republic 

are not accommodated." The speaker exhausted 
his keen-edged sarcasm on the word " national " 
and the uses to which the word was put by the 
defenders of the improvement bills. He affirmed 
that he was sure a number of men who proposed 
to support the Buffalo-New Orleans Road Bill 
would not consider it sufficiently " national " if 
it were known that it was not to pass through 
their districts; he affirmed that every catfish in 
the Ohio Biver was a " national " catfish as truly 
as the Cumberland Boad was a national road; 
he challenged the friends of the bill to decide 
definitely upon a route for the proposed road 
from the Lakes to the Gulf, and then hold true 
to the measure representatives from districts 
through which the road was not to pass. Polk 
affirmed that the many various surveys were made 
merely to ally with the friends of the measure 
the representatives of all districts touched by 
these alternative courses. " This same national 
road was mounted as a political hobby in my dis- 
trict," said the Tennessean ; " for a time the people 
seemed to be carried away with the prospect 



Pilots of the Republic 355 

of having millions of public money expended 
among them. We were to have a main route and 
cross routes intersecting the district in every 
direction. It was to run down every creek, and 
pass through almost every neighborhood in the 
district. As soon as there was time for reason to 
assume her seat the delusion passed off." 

These points of opposition to the improvement 
campaign have been outlined at some length to 
show the strength of the opposition and the 
ground it took. No measure went through Con- 
gress for any kind of Government aid without 
the strongest kind of opposition; in fact, the 
Virginia delegates worked and voted against the 
Dismal Swamp Canal in their own State in order 
to be consistent with their oft-expressed views 
on such questions. Yet, one by one, a consider- 
able number of important measures of internal 
improvement went through Congress and re- 
ceived the signatures of the different Presidents ; 
the effect of these measures was inestimably 
beneficial, giving a marked impetus to national 
development, and awakening in men's minds a 



356 Pilots of the Bcpuhlic 

dim conception of the gro^\i;h that was to be the 
one great wonder of the century. 

From the adoption of the Constitution to tlie 
year 1828 the following smns were granted by 
the general Government for purposes either of 
education or road-building or canal-building: 
Maine, $9,500; New York, $4,156; Tennes- 
see, $254,000; Arkansas, $45,000; ^Michigan, 
$45,000; Florida, $83,417; Ohio, $2,527,404; 
Illinois, $1,725,959; Indiana, $1,513,161; Mis- 
souri, $1,462,471; iSIississippi, $600,667; Ala- 
bama, $1,534,727; Louisiana, $1,166,361. In 
addition to this the Government built, or assisted 
in building, five great works of improvement 
from among the scores that were proposed. For 
the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal $300,000 
was advanced; for the Chesapeake and Ohio 
Canal, $10,000; for the Dismal Swamp Canal, 
$150,000; for the Louisville and Portland 
Canal, $90,000; for the Cumberland Road, 
$2,230,903; for western and southwestern State 
roads, $76,595, making a total appropriation of 
$13,838,886. 



Pilots of the Republic 357 

The danger of the system was in making the 
national purse an object of plunder for Con- 
gressmen, and the consequent danger of unholy 
alliances and combinations for looting the public 
treasur}^ It is interesting that for so long a 
period as it was in vogue there were so slight 
s\Tnptoms of this sort of thing; and men little 
knew that, by acting on liberal lines at the time, 
despite the dangers and risks, they were exerting 
a power to shape the new nation, to incite private 
investment, to encourage State and private works 
of promotion, and to aid the commercial awaken- 
ing of a people to an activity and an enterprise 
whose possibilities cannot at the present day be 
estimated. Take the Portland Canal around the 
historic "falls of the Ohio" at Louisville; this 
was a work for no one State in particular to per- 
form, not even Kentucky; it was a detriment to 
Louisville itself, for it destroyed the old portage 
business, as the Erie Canal ruined the overland 
carrying trade between Schenectady and Albany. 
All the States bordering on the Ohio were bene- 
fited by this improvement, as was equally true 



358 Pilots of the Republic 

respecting the Government's improvement of 
the Ohio River itself, which began in 1825. The 
Portland Canal was one of the important invest- 
ments which tended to prove the financial benefit 
of such investments. The Government's total 
subscription of stock was $233,500; when the 
affairs of the Company were closed in 1874 by 
the purchase of the canal by the Government, 
it was found that the national profit (in mere 
interest) had been $257,778. This was due to 
exorbitant tolls charged by the Company, which 
resulted, finally, in the purchase of the canal and 
throwing it open toll-free. 

The men who labored for this era of improve- 
ment are practically unknown, with the exception 
of two or three who became prominent because of 
special ability or renown gained in other lines 
of activity, like Clay and Calhoun. It is not 
important here to attempt to catalogue them; 
the work they did by voting for the so-called 
American System was of critical importance; 
but, still greater, in so doing they were showing 
a braver, more optimistic, more American spirit 



Pilots of the Bepuhlic 359 

and a high faith in the fundamental good judg- 
ment of the people. It was, without doubt, a 
dangerous extreme to approach, possible of 
wanton violation in unprincipled hands, and a 
precedent of very questionable tendencies. But 
it was of immeasurable importance that such 
moral support as just such acts as these afforded 
should have come at just this time; and, could 
we read the result aright, it would be seen, possi- 
bly, that much of our commercial success found 
its origin at this very moment, and came into 
being because a number of men at this cru- 
cial time gave an impetus to private adventure 
and private investment that was almost provi- 
dential in its ultimate effect on our national life. 
Losing their individual identity in the common 
promotion of temporary measures of infinite 
national advantage, they will be remembered only 
in a vague, impersonal way as men who honored 
their country by trusting in its destiny and 
believing in the genius of its growth. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



" Adams," 295 
Adams, Herbert B., 78 
Adams, John Quincy, 244, 344 
"Adventure Gallej^" 119 
Alleghany Portage Railway, 251- 

255 
American Board of Commission- 
ers for Foreign Missions, 304, 
317, 318, 329 
American Fur Company, 310, 311 
American Historical Review, 3-20 
" American System," 345-358 
Ashburton Treaty, 330 
Ashley, — , 311 

Astor, John Jacob, 282-297, 343 
Astoria, 282, 289-296 

Bacon, James H., 201 
Baltimore, 36, 241-244, 248, 255 
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 36, 

77, 243-245, 248 
Bartleson, Colonel, 331 
Bartlett, —,189 
" Beautiful Spring " (Schdn- 

brunn), 141 
" Beaver," 294, 295 
Bensons, The, in Oregon, 333 
Bethlehem, Pa., 133, 134 
Bliss, — , 189 
Block, Captain, 296 
Bonneville, — , 311 
Boone, Daniel, 29, 30, 89-101 
Boonesborough, Ky., 96, 101, 116 
Bouquet, — , 284 
Bourne, Prof. E. G., 320 



Bradford County, Pa., 138 
Bridger, James, 311, 335 
Brown, George, 242 
Buffalo-New Orleans Road, 352- 

354 
Bullock, Leonard Henley, 90 
Bunch of Grapes Tavern, Boston, 

112 
Burnett, Peter H., 331 
Bushnell, — , 206 
Butterfield, — , 336 

Calhoun, John C, 322, 344, 358 

Calk, William, 96 

Canals, 35, 36, 209-232, 239-245, 

247, 249-254 
Carroll, Charles, 77, 244 
Carter's Valley, 99 
Cass, — , 189 
Catholic missionaries in Oregon, 

314, 319, 326, 333 
Catlin, George, 304 
Chastellux, Chevalier de, 62 
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, 76, 

215, 240, 243-245, 247-249, 352, 

356 
Clark, George Rogers, 100, 151- 

178, 261, 329 
Clark, Jonathan, 153-157 
Clark, WiUiam, 156, 157, 262-272, 

281, 283, 287, 290, 303 
Clarksville, 176 
Clay, Henry, 184, 192, 205, 342, 

344-346, 358 
Claysville, Pa., 184 



364 



Index 



Cleaveland, Moses, 124 

Cleveland, Ohio, 124 

Clinton, Gov. De Witt, 35, 135- 
137, 218, 229, 230 

"Clinton's Ditch," 218, 221 

Coal, 54, 56 

Colquit, — , 189 

Colter, — , 270 

Commonwealth, The (Pittsburg), 
216 

Congregational missions to In- 
dians, 304 

Congress, Powers of, 346 

Connellsville, Pa., 163 

Coshocton, Ohio, 141 

Crab Orchard, Ky., 97 

Crawford, William, 45-47, 49-52, 
55, 334 

Cressap, Captain, 170 

Cumberland Gap, 98 

Cumberland Road, 35, 74, 77, 181- 
206, 228, 235, 343-345, 356 

Cushing, Caleb, 321 

Cutler, Rev. Manasseh, 111-115, 
117; his son, 120 

" Defiance" stage line, 200, 201 

Delafield, — , 189 

Delaware and Chesapeake Canal, 

356 
Devol, — , 120 

DeWitt, Simeon, 211, 212, 218 
Dickson, — , 270 
Dismal Swamp Canal, 355, 356 
Dunmore, Governor, 87 
Dunmore's War, 91, 170 

East India Company, 288 
Eddy, Thomas, 218 
Eells, Dr. Cushing, quoted, 319 
English, William H., quoted, 171, 

176 
" Enterprise," 295 



Erie Canal, 35, 74, 76, 209-232, 

239, 249, 343, 350, 351, 357 
Everett, Edward, 147, 196, 197 

" Falls of the Ohio" (Louisville), 

97, 175, 176 
Farnham, — , 333 
" Father of Ohio," 124 
Fearing, — , 120 
Fife, WiUiam H., 201 
Forbes's Road, 118 
Forman, Joshua, 216 
Fort Boone, 96, 99, 101 
Fort Detroit, 139, 143 
Fort Duquesne, 164, 315, 316 
Fort Edward, N. Y., 210, 211 
Fort Harmar, 116, 121 
Fort Necessity, 163 
Fort Pitt, 115, 139, 143, 164 
Fort William, N. Y., 136 
" Founders of Ohio," 118 
Freeman, Thomas, 52 
Fremont, John C, 311, 321, 332, 

335 
Fulton, Robert, 218 
Fur trade, 281, 282, 284-296, 314, 

315 

Gallatin, Albert, 184, 189, 284, 

347 
Gant, John, 331 
Geddes, James, 211, 212 
Genesee Messenger, The, 216 
Gilmans, The,"l20 
Gnadenhiitten, Ohio, 141, 146, 

336 
" Good Intent" stage line, 200 
Goodale, — , 120 
Government ownership, 191, 198 
Gratiot, — , 189 
Gray, Captain, 268, 287 
Gray, William H., 310 
Great Meadows, 47, 163 



Index 



365 



Greene, — , 120 

Greene, — , of American Board 

of Foreign Missions, 326, 329, 

331, 337 
Greenhow's " Memoir," 330 
Grist-mill, First west of Alle- 

ghanies, 55 

Hancock, — , 270 
Hanks, Abraham, 96 
Harrison, William Henry, 261 
Harrodsburg, Ky., 97 
Harrodstown, Ky., 173 
Hart, David, 90, 93 
Hartzell, — , 189 
Hawley, Jesse, 215, 216 
Hawley, M. S., 219 
Heath, General, 108 
Heckewelder, John, 31, 142 
Henderson, Ky., 99 
Henderson, Richard, 29, 30, 83- 

101, 172-174, 182, 260, 343 
" Hercules " (Jesse Hawley), 215 
Higgins, — , 167, 168 
" Hit or Miss," 252, 253 
Hoar, Senator, quoted, 107-110, 

119, 120 
Hogg, James, 90 
Howard, Captain, 334 
Hudson Bay Company, 287, 288, 

312, 314 
Hunt, Wilson Price, 291-295 

Illinois, 100, 105, 174, 175, 177 

Independence Township, Cuya- 
hoga Co., Ohio, 145 

Indiana, 100, 105 

Indians, 31, 87, 121, 131-146, 164- 
166, 303, 303, 309 

Irving, Washington, quoted, 286 

Jefferson, Thomas, 79, 153, 215, 

259, 262, 342, 347 
Jeffersonville, Ky., 176 



Johnson, Thomas, 59 
Johnson, Sir William, 137 
Johnston, Joseph E., 189 
Johnstone, William, 90 
Jones, Rev. David, 165-168 
Jones, John Gabriel, 173 
" June Bug " stage line, 200 

Kansas City (Westport), 322 
Kent, Chancellor, 218-220 
Ken-ta-kee, Kentucky, 117-175 
Kentucky, 29, 30, 79, 91-100, ni- 
ne, 183 

Lamb, Mrs. Martha J., quoted, 

307 
Lancaster Turnpike, 187, 188 
" Landlords " stage line, 200 
Lands, Western, 28, 39-58, 66, 163 
" Lark," 294 

Lawrence County, Pa., 140 
Lawyer's examination, 83-86 
Lee, Capt. Hancock, 171 
Lee, Rev. Jason, 304 
Leestown, on Kentucky River, 

171 
" Legend of Whitman's Ride, 

The," 320 
" Letter of John Zachrey," 323 
Lewis and Clark Expedition, 79, 

157, 262-272, 281, 283, 287, 290, 

301 
Lewis, Gen. Andrew, 87 
Lewis, Meriwether, 262-272, 281, 

283, 287, 290 
Lewis, Gov. Morgan, 210, 211 
Lichtenau, Ohio, 141 
Linn, Le\vis F., 321. 330 
Livingston, Robert R., 218 
Locomotives, 246 
" Long Hunters," 87, 88 
Louisiana Territory, 259-277, 281, 

290 
Louisville, Ky., 97, 175, 176 



366 



Index 



Louisville and Portland Canal, 

356-358 
Luttrell, John, 90, 93 

Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, 287 

Macomb County, Mich., 145 

Madison, James, 158 

Mansfield, — , 189 

Manufactures in Oregon, 333 

Manypenny, Geo. VV., 201 

" Marcus Whitman," 33T 

Marietta, O., 116, 121-125 

Marietta College, 125 

Martin, Captain Joseph, 93, 97 

Maryland, 239-248 

Massie, — , 124 

Mauch Chunk, Pa., 242 

Maysville Road Bill, 74 

McDougal, Duncan, 291, 296 

McKee, — , 189 

McKenzie, Donald, 291 

" Meadow of Light " (Lichtenau), 

31, 141, 313 
Meigs, — , 119 
" Memoir " (Greenhow), 330 
Mercer, Colonel, 49 
Mercer, — , of the Chesapeake 

and Ohio Canal, 352 
Methodist missions to Indians, 

304 
Michigan, 105 
Milan, Erie Co., Ohio, 145 
Millstones from Alleghanies, 5S 
Missionaries to Indians, 304, 309- 

319, 326-328, 332, 333 
Mohawk VaUey route, 62, 76, 78, 

214 
Monroe, President, 191-193 
Moravian Brethren, 31, 115, 131- 

146, 304, 305 
Morris, Gouverneur, 35, 210-212, 

218 
Mounds in Ohio Valley, 170 



Moundsville, W. Va., 170 
Mowry, William A., 337 

National Road Stage Company, 

199 
Neville, Presley, 57 
New Albany, KJ^, 176 
New Philadelphia, Ohio, 131 
New York City, 241 
North Carolina, 30, 87, 98-100 
Northwest Company of Montreal, 

282, 287, 288, 290, 294, 296 

OcoNOSTOTA, Cherokee chief, 90 
Ohio, 30, 31, 76, 100, 105, 113- 

147, 243 
Ohio Company, 48, 49, 92, 113- 

125 
Ohio National Stage Company, 

199 
" Old Two-Horn," 125 
Ordinance of 1787, 41, 79, 92, 

112-115, 117, 123 
'* Oregon Emigrating Society," 

331 
Oregon Territory, 301-338 
" Origin of the Erie Canal, The," 

219 
Owens, David, 166-168 

Pacific Fur Company, 291, 292 
Parker, Rev. Samuel, 308, 309 
Parkersburg, W. Va., 167 
Parsons, — ,120 
Pennsylvania Canal, 249-254 
Pennsylvania Railway, 249, 250, 

254 
Pennsylvania Road, 118 
Perryopolis, Fayette Co., Pa., 55 
Philadelphia, 241 
Philadelphia and Columbia Rail- 
way, 253 
PickeU, — , 189 



Index 



367 



Pike, Zebulon M., 272-277, 281 
"Pilot "stage line, 200 
" Pioneer " stage line, 200 
Pittsburg, 115, 163, 168 
Piatt, Judge, 218, 219 
Polk, James K., 353, 354 
Porter, Hon. James M.,324, 325 
Post, Frederick Christian, 134-137 
Potomac Company, 74-76, 236- 

240, 245 
Potomac River Improvements, 

58-61, 65-68, 72, 75,. 79, 213, 

236-240, 297 
Potter County, Pa., 140 
Prentiss, Miss (Mrs. Whitman), 

307, 310 
Presbyterian missions to Indians, 

304 
Putnam, Gen. Rufus, 106-114, 

118-127, 182, 260, 342, 343 

" Raccoon," 296 

Railroads, 242-246, 248-255 

Read, Thomas B. , author " Sher- 
idan's Ride," 336 

Rianhard, William, 201 

Richardson, Judge, 224 

Rickraan, — , 331 

River improvement, 237 

Road-building, 35, 77, 181-206, 
352-356 

Robertson, Donald, 158 

Robinson, Moncure, 252 

Rome, N. Y., 136, 223 

Roosevelt, Theodore, quoted, 264, 
275 

Sandusky, Ohio, 143 
Sargent, Winthrop, 112, 115 
Schonbrunn, Ohio, 141 
Schuyler, Gen. Philip, 218 
Schuylkill and Susquehanna 
Canal, 215 



Scioto Company, 114 

Sheridan, Philip, 336 

" Sheridan's Ride," 336 

Slavery, 123 

Soldiers' lands, 48-52, 111, 112, 
122 

South Pass, 308, 322 

Spaulding, Rev. Henry H., and 
wife, 310-313 

Sproat, Col. Ebenezer, 118, 120 

Stage-coach lines, 199-202 

St. Clair, Gov. Arthur, 120, 122, 
125, 126, 284 

Steamboats, 72, 218 

Steubenville, Ohio, 166 

Stewart's Crossing (Connellsville, 
Pa.), 163, 171 

St. Louis, 263, 270 

Surplus for internal improve- 
ments, 347 

Surveyors, 158-160 

Swann, Thomas, 248 

Taylou. Lieut.-Gov. John, 219 
"Tents of Grace" (Gnaden- 

hutten), 141 
Territory Northwest of the River 

Ohio, 113 
Thomas, Nathaniel, 90 
Thomas, Philip Evan, 35, 241- 

243, 255 
Thompson, Chief Justice, 219 
Thorn, Captain, 292 
Thornton, Col., 331 
Todd, Col. John, 177 
Toledo, Ohio, 261 
"Tom Thumb," Peter Cooper's 

locomotive, 246 
Tompkins, Governor, 219, 220 
" Tonquin," 292-294 
Tran.sylvania Company, 88-91, 

98-100, 116, 172, 173 
Treaty of Fort Mcintosh, 121 



368 



Index 



Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 59, 87- 

89 
Treaty of Fort Watauga, 90 
Tupper, — , 120 

Uniontown, Pa., 199 

Vance, — , 189 
Varnum, — , 119 

Virginia, 30, 59, 79, 87-89, 98- 
100, 173, 176, 177, 239, 240 

Walker, Felix, 91 

Walpole Grant, 49, 51 

"Washington and the West" 
(Hulbert), 65, 80 

Washington Coal and Coke Com- 
pany, 56 

Washington, George, 27-30, 39- 
80, 106-108, 126, 159, 160, 163, 
182, 236, 238, 252, 253, 297, 334 

Washington State, Settlement of, 
312, 316 

Washington's Bottoms, 47 

Washington's Letter to Benjamin 
Harrison, 1784, 68-74, 236, 253 

Washington's Run mill, 55 

Watauga Settlement, 89-92 

Watson, Elkanah, 211 

Wayne, Anthony, 126, 261 



Weaver, Jno. W. & Co., 201 
Webster, Daniel, 123, 330, 342, 

344 
Welch, Sylvester, 252, 255 
West Newton, Pa., 118 
Westport (Kansas City), 322 
Wheeling, W. Va., 166 
Whipple, — , 119 
White, Major Hatfield, 117 
Whitman, Marcus, 305-338 
Whitman, Mrs., 307, 310-312 
Wilkes, Lieutenant, 330, 331 
Wilkinson, General, 273 
WiUiams, — , 189 
Williams, Judge John, 90 
"Winning of the West, The," 

275 
Winsor, Justin, quoted, 321 
Wisconsin, 105 
Women in the Northwest, 311, 

312 
Wright, F. M., 201 

Yates, Judge, 218, 219 
Yontz, Jno., 201 
Young, Samuel, 224 

Zeisberger, David, 31, 115, 131- 
147, 182, 284, 305, 336 



Uniform with ^'Pilots of the Republic''' 



THE GLORY SEEKERS 

THE ROMANCE OF WOULD-BE 
FOUNDERS OF EMPIRE IN THE 
EARLY DAYS OF THE SOUTHWEST 

BY 

WILLIAM HORACE BROWN 

Illustrated with portraits, and with original drawings 
hy W. J. Enright. Price $1.50 net. 

" Here is a history that reads hke sheer romance. Mr. Brown tells 
in a delightful way the story of those who dreamed dreams of empire 
in the far West. . . . The book, typographically, is a fine sample of 
McClurg work. It is profusely illustrated." — Toledo Times Bee. 

" It is a pleasure to assure the reader that one may have as much 
•fun reading 'The Glory Seekers' as William Horace Brown had 
writing it. Few historical books are written in such sprightly vein, 
and few informative books of any sort are so leavened with humor. " — 
St. Louis Post Dispatch. 

" When romance and history, adventure and fact, are combined in 
readable style, and the history happens to be a field with which we 
are not all familiar, but in which we are much interested, a book is 
produced that will be irresistible to many. . . . Thrilling adventure is 
plentiful in these pages, and it has the added interest of its political 
significance. Written in a pleasant, familiar style, not without sharp 
and illuminating comment, ' The Glory Seekers ' is a book to be read 
with keen delight by the student of history and the lover of romance." 
— Des Moines Mail and Times. 



A. C. McCLURG & CO., Publishers 



THE GLORY SEEKERS 



"A volume which will find an honorable place among Americana. 
. . . Mr. Brown's style is detailed and explicit. He indulges in keen 
character delineation. He makes these hardy adventurers offer their 
specious apologies. They cease to be the dim and menacing figures 
of our national history and become comprehensible, if fatal, figures. 
The book is one which fills a vacancy in history." — Chicago Tribune. 

" His effort has been rather to scrape off the successive coats of 
whitewash which local historians have liberally applied to the darker 
side of their deeds, and, while giving the would-be empire builders full 
credit for their personal bravery and physical prowess, to show forth 
their ambitions and exploits in their true colors. " — Neio York Tribune. 

"A book that reads like a novel. ... It is not a story to make 
' every American's cheek flush with pride,' but, ' The Glory Seekers ' 
is a strong and vivid depiction of the true history of the Southwest, 
colored with incident and anecdote, and suffused with the enthusiastic 
Americanism which the most cynical attitude cannot hide." — Butte 
Inter Mountain. 

" A unique, interesting, and valuable story of the early days of the 
Southwest, when adventurous spirits tried at various times to establish 
an empire there. Mr. Brown has made an exhaustive study of his 
subject, and has the facts, which are presented with a cleverness of 
narration that makes them most delightful reading." — Pittsburg 
JJispatch. 

" Very unconventional in its style, lively and highly entertaining." — 
The Churchman. 

" The author of this excellent and exceedingly interesting work has 
made a thorough study of the various efforts to found local govern- 
ments in Texas, independent of Mexico, at an early day. . . . He is to 
be congratulated for his excellent work in this historical summary of 
events in that great region." — Salt Lake Tribune. 

"The work is well done. The narratives are lively and well told, 
and while not highly important episodes, they are all worth preserving 
as correctives to the too partial story of the colonial patriots as served 
up in the usual United States histories, if for nothing else." — Ne^o 
York American. 

"The romantic story of conquest is brilliantly told." — Portland 
Oregonian. 



A. C. McCLURG & CO., Publishers 



Volumes of Pioneer History 

By REUBEN GOLD THWAITES 

HOW GEORGE ROGERS CLARK WON THE 
NORTHWEST 

AND OTHER ESSAYS IN WESTERN HISTORY 

With maps and illustrations 

The majority of the eight essays contained in the volume were first 
deUvered as lectures, and were later accorded magazine publication. 
For the present publication they have been radically revised and 
brought down to date, and comprise an exceptionally interesting col- 
lection of papers covering a wide range of topics under the one general 
head. The titles of the essays are as follows : " How George Rogers 
Clark Won the Northwest," " The Division of the Northwest into 
States," "The Black Hawk War," "The Story of the Mackinac," 
" The Story of La Pointe," " A Day on Braddock's Road," " Early 
Lead Mining on the Upper Mississippi," "The Draper Manuscripts." 

ON THE STORIED OHIO 

An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo. 
With new Preface and full-page illustrations from photographs. 

This trip was undertaken by Mr. Thwaites some years ago, with the 
idea of gathering local color for his studies of Western history. The 
Ohio River was an important factor in the development of the West. 
The voyage is described with much charm and humor, and with a con- 
stant realization of the historical traditions on every side. For the 
better understanding of these references, the author has added a brief 
sketch of the settlement of the Ohio Valle)-. A selected list of jour- 
nals of previous travellers has also been included. 

DOWN HISTORIC WATERWAYS 

Six Hundred Miles of Canoeing upon Illinois and Wisconsin Rivers. Second Edition, 
revised, with new Preface, and eigM full-page illustrations from photographs. 

Mr. Thwaites' book is not only a charming account of a summer 
canoe trip, but an excellent guide for any one who is contemplating a 
similar " inland voyage." The course followed by the canoeist is de- 
scribed with a practical accuracy that makes it of great assistance, but 
in an engaging style that will appeal strongly to every lover of out- 
door life. " It is a book to be read to get the spirit of the woods and 
rivers and streams and lakes. " — Worcester Spy. 

Unifonn Binding. Each 12mo, $1.20 7iet. 



A. C. McCLURG & CO., Publishers 



MRS. DYE'S FAMOUS BOOKS 
ON THE NORTHWEST 

McDonald of oregon 

By Eva E,-mery Dye. A Tale of Two Shores. Illustrations by 
Walter J. Enright. l^imo, $1.50. 

The chance casting away of a party of Japanese on the Oregon coast many years ago 
inspired McDoualJ, a fully historical personage, to enact a similar drama in his own 
proper self with the characters and continents reversed. Landing on the shores of 
Japan he was passed from governor to governor until he reached the capital. There he 
was permitted to establish a school, and it was actually his pupils who acted as interpre- 
ters during the negotiations with Commodore Perry, generally supposed to be the first of 
Americans to enter Japan. Mrs. Dye has long been aware of the facts in McDonald's 
unusual career, having obtained tliem largely from his own lips ; but she deferrcl pub- 
lication imtil liis papers filially reposed in her hands. It will be remembered tliat the 
hero of this new book entered largely into her story of "McLoughliu and Old Oregon," 
to which this later volume is in a sense a sequel. 

THE CONQUEST 

By Eva Emery Dye. Being the True Story of Lewis and Clark. 
Third Edition, with frontispiece in full color by Charlotte Weber. 
1 >mo, $1.50. 

No book published in recent years has more of tremendous import between its 
covers, and certauily no recent novel has in it more of the elements of a permanent 
success. A historical romance which tells with accuracy and inspiring style of the 
bravery of the pioneers in winning the western continent should have a lasting place in 
the esteem of every American. 

" No one who wishes to know the true story of the conquest of the greater part of 
this great nation can afford to pass by this book." — Cleveland Leader. 

" A vivid picture of the Indian wars preceding the Louisiana purchase, of the ex- 
pedition of Lewis and Clark, and of events following the occwpation of Oregon." — The 
Congregationalist. 

" It may not be the great American novel we have been waiting for so long, but it 
certainly looks as though it would be very near it." — Rocliester Times. 

" The characters that are assembled in 'The Conquest' belong to the history of the 
United States ; their story is a national epic." — Detroit Free Press. 

McLOUGHLIN AND OLD OREGON 

By Eva Emery Dye. A Chronicle. Fifth Edition. 12mo, $1.50. 

This is a most graphic and interesting chronicle of the movement which added to 
the United States tliat vast territory, previously a British possession, of which Oregon 
formed a part, and how Dr. John McLoughlin, then chief factor of the Hudson's Bay 
Company for the Northwest, by his fiitlierly interest in the settlers, displeased the 
Hudson's Bay Company and aided in bringing this about. The author has gathered her 
facts at first hand, and as a result the work is vivid and picturesque and reads like a 
romance. 

" A spirited narrative of what life in the wilderness meant in the early days, a 
record of heroism, self-sacrifice, and dogged persistence ; a graphic page of the story of 
the American pioneer." — ^'ew York Mail and Express. 



A. C. McCLURG & CO., Publishers 



^2- 



i-'. 



'i\ 



(D 



Deacidided using the Bookkeeper proca 




